


The Detectives Who Laugh

by CatrionaKirke



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Crossover Pairings, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:54:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 25,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24423838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatrionaKirke/pseuds/CatrionaKirke
Summary: After a skiing accident, billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne ends up in a coma, and consequently, all hell breaks loose in Gotham. After a breakout in Arkham Asylum, Batman's (who is mysteriously nowhere to be seen) entire rogues gallery is on the run, and one of them decides to cross state lines into New York City. Three bodies have been found murdered with the phrase "Ha Ha!" carved into their chest. It's up to Manhattan's SVU to catch the perpetrator, and they can only do it with the help of Gotham PD.As worlds collide, the squad of SVU is exposed to a world they couldn't dream existed. Strange people in costume running elaborate crimes, abilities they've never seen before. Luckily, they're an elite squad, and it's only a matter of time before Bruce Wayne wakes up and Batman returns...they hope. But as the insanity of Gotham starts to get to the detectives, they face a dilemma: stay the course, or become part of the madness?Batman/SVU crossover AU with slight changes to the SVU timeline. Carisi is still a detective, Kat is still the rookie. Barba also never left. Gotham is a city in New Jersey, as comic canon dictates. Robert Goren is current year Robert, so it's like ten years or so after he left Manhattan.
Relationships: Dominick "Sonny" Carisi Jr./Amanda Rollins, Jim Gordon/Olivia Benson, Joker/Amanda Rollins, Poison Ivy/Harley Quinn/Katriona "Kat" Amar Tamin, Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle/Rafael Barba
Kudos: 15





	1. All's Quiet in Gotham City

It was quiet in Gotham, and that should have been the first clue that something was wrong. Sure, there were the usual sounds of a bustling city, traffic, cars honking for no reason, a few streets below a couple fought on their way home from a dinner out. The usual stuff, but when it came to the actual dark pulse of the city...it was _quiet._ Beneath all of that glamour and art nouveau architecture, the beating heart of Gotham was a diseased one, but for some reason, on this night, it lay still. The full moon hung low in the sky, silhouetted against darkening clouds. 

Normally, this would calm Tim Drake, or "Robin" as he had dubbed himself, but something was wrong. There was something on the wind that stirred his heart, made him feel dread. Batman was late. 

Batman was _never_ late. 

They were supposed to be putting a stop to an illegal shipment of fear gas that was skipping Port Adams and heading directly to Slaughter Swamp, that marshy lump of land at the bottom of the island. While Robin was perched at the very top of the clock tower in the Old Gotham district, staring through a pair of extremely expensive night vision goggles at the black ocean to the east, he saw no hint of any boat. Not even a fishing boat. Not even a yacht like his dad owned. Just calm seas, all the way to Port Adams. Stuff like this annoyed Robin, the Scarecrow had been in Arkham for coming on a year now, and still his fear gas crept its way into the city. It couldn't be the Joker's doing, the Joker finally occupied a cell next to Dr. Jonathan Crane, and who else used it? 

That was the problem, pretty much anyone could use it. 

Robin pressed the earpiece in his right ear. "Batman, you copy?"

Static. 

He didn't like working alone. It was probably stupid to be like that, since the sheer act of putting on a costume and going out every night was suicide anyway, but every so often, when he was by himself, his mind wandered to the Robin before him. Jason. Sometimes he could hear the CLANK of a crowbar as it hit the ground over and over and over and over and-

_The Joker is in Arkham._

Yeah, but how many more people are out there like him?

Idly, Robin rattled off the list of villains he knew. Scarecrow (obviously), at least eight Clayfaces. Two-Face. The Riddler. Penguin. Some guy who could make fog. There were a lot, and some were on the run, and any one of them could show up right now and beat his little sidekick brains in. 

Well, maybe not on top of the clock tower though. 

"Maybe," he whispered out loud. "Things are actually normal tonight." 

On cue, the sirens began. 

Robin jumped to his feet at the cacophony. The sirens looked like they were coming from every direction. He swung his night vision binoculars in a circular motion to locate the sources of the sound. The Diamond District (a likely place) was surprisingly quiet, so was City Hall, the Fashion District and the rest. He hesitated, terrified, before he swung his binoculars north. 

Arkham Island was alight. Even from across the city, Robin could see spotlights, the blue and red of flashing lights. The Narrows were similar, and maybe Robin was imagining it, being so far away, but he thought he could hear screams. 

What he didn't hear were the footsteps that crept up behind him. 

"Robin," a voice purred. He spun, batarang in hand, only to come face to face with Catwoman. 

_Selina Kyle_ , a smug voice in his head reminded him. It had been stupidly easy to deduce who she was, it didn't help that she flirted with both Batman and Bruce Wayne alike. Either way, he relaxed a little, Catwoman was on their side...mostly. She stood cloaked in shadow, although his mind could fill in the rest. A lithe body sheathed in deep purple leather, sharp knives tipped her fingers like claws. Her mass of wavy raven hair was hidden beneath her cat-eared cowl, but the sapphire blue eyes still peered out. How it took so long for Bruce to figure it out was insane. 

"What's wrong?" he asked. "What's going on?"

She was calm, but he wasn't sure if that was good or bad. Her left hand rested on the whip curled at her waist. 

"Everything," she explained. "But you have to come with me."

"Did Batman send you?"

"He would if he would."

So Robin followed, swinging down from the clock tower in his zipline as she did, although Catwoman did it with much more grace. She twisted with the air, let it carry her, it almost looked like she was flying, but he knew that it was just acrobatics. She wasn't a freak like a lot of the other costumed people around here. They moved quickly, but it still felt like forever. Carefully avoiding the Narrows, Arkham Island, once they hit Robert Kane Memorial Bridge, Robin got nervous. 

"Catwoman, where are we going?"

She said nothing, and he got on the back of her motorcycle parked near the bridge's entrance. With his arms wrapped around her waist, he could feel every muscle in her body tense. He could feel her fear. 

They didn't drive to Wayne Manor like he assumed, instead they veered east until she stopped in front of majestically wrought gates off the Gotham Cemetery. The place always reminded him of Green-Wood in Brooklyn. It was beautiful as far as places for the dead went. Trees with heavy branches filled with flowers in the spring and summer. Gorgeously made tombstones and family mausoleums made the place look more like a garden filled with art pieces than what it actually was. Catwoman moved through the tombs with her usual grace, underlined by tension. It was only until they got closer to the grave of the Wayne family that she broke into a run. 

"Wait!" Robin ran after her. Why wasn't she telling him anything!? If anything, his imagination made things worse. 

The gravesite of Thomas and Martha Wayne could be considered modest compared to what they could have afforded. They were buried side by side and a beautifully carved statue of an angel stood between them, arms outstretched to receive them in heaven, probably. Immediately, Robin knew something was wrong. 

For one thing, the wings of the angel had been torn off, littering the ground in chunks of marble. 

Secondly, a dark shape lay broken in the arms of the now fallen angel. 

Robin didn't need to have the genius intellect he had to know what that shape was. 

"Batman!" 

Catwoman stood at the foot of the statue, her eyes never leaving its burden. "I didn't want to move him," she said by way of explanation. "I don't know what's broken."

Robin looked at Batman's body and silently agreed. "We need an ambulance, now." 

"No!" Catwoman's eyes flashed in panic. "We just need to get him to Alfred, he'll know what to do."

Alfred was many things, but as Robin eyed the broken limbs of his hero, he doubted he was an expert surgeon. "How do you know he isn't dead?" he asked. 

"i know."

Alright then, he reached for his communicator to call it in. "Wait, Selina?"

"Tim."

"Who did this?"

She shook her head. "I don't know, it could be anyone."

"But-"

"Anyone!" she insisted. "They're all out. Every last one of them. Bane. Joker. All of them."

Robin's heart sank. He called for Alfred. 

**

"Did you hear about what's going on down in Gotham?" Amanda Rollins asked as she leaned back in her desk chair. Across from her, Dominick "Sonny" Carisi raised an eyebrow. 

"What, with that billionaire guy?" he waved his hand dismissively. "Those guys get so bored they gotta do crazy things like skiing in non-designated areas. He's lucky he didn't lose his head."

Amanda looked amused. "Not a skier, Sonny?"

"Ah, there's somethin' weird to me about strappin a bunch of sticks to your feet and pushin' yourself down a hill." He reached for his coffee and took a sip, grimacing. It was cold. 

The squadroom of Manhattan SVU had been abuzz with the news about Bruce Wayne. When one of the most influential people in New Jersey gets that hurt, a lot of board rooms start to panic. Captian Olivia Benson knew that this would be the big topic of conversation today, even if she wasn't the type to follow people who were famous just for being rich. She had more important things to care about. 

She walked by Sonny and Amanda as they chatted, pausing to take note that Fin sat nearby, not really listening to the whole thing. in fact, he looked about as dismissive as she felt. 

"What's wrong, Fin? Not interested in the latest antics of Bruce Wayne?"

"Something about that stinks to me," Fin explained, ignoring the surprised looks on Amanda and Sonny's faces. "Dude lives in South Jersey, it's March, and he's getting into a skiing accident?"

"He owns seventeen helicopters!" Amanda protested. "He could probably go somewhere where there's snow."

Fin shrugged. "If you say so."

As serious as she tried to hold herself, Olivia enjoyed the banter between her detectives. It didn't feel like there were enough days like this, when they could simply sit around and chat. It helped to build rapport, and that was important for a team. They were always putting their lives on the line in times like this. it helped if you actually wanted to save the person out there with you. 

She was waiting for a phone to ring, for the peace to break that way, but instead Katriona "Kat" Azar Tamin walked in and ruined it instead. 

"Did you guys hear?!" she asked, barely breaking her stride to her desk before she leaned over her computer and started typing. 

"About Bruce Wayne? Yes. Everyone did," Fin said tiredly. 

"No, not about Wayne, although that may have something to do with this. Look."

Kat swung her monitor around to show the rest of the squad. It was Twitter, and it was filled with panicked messages from Gotham citizens.

"What is this?" Olivia asked, narrowing her eyes and leaning forward to read some of the tweets.

"It's twitter," Sonny explained needlessly. "My niece Mia has one'a them. It's like sharing little thought messages and stuff."

"Finger on the pulse of technology," Amanda quipped. Kat, however, was not interested in banter. 

"It's also an awesome source of news, news that reporters might not have gotten to yet. You guys know about the asylum over there, right?"

"Arkham?" Fin tuned back into the conversation. "I thought that was shut down."

"It might be," Kat replied. "Given the fact that dozens of criminals just broke out."

"Wait a minute." Olivia took off her glasses and stepped closer to the monitor, eyeing the pictures of a flaming building that might have once been Arkham Asylum. "Why isn't this all over the news?"

Kat shrugged. 

"Gotham's got it's work cut out for it then," Sonny observed. 

"As long as they don't come over here, I'm fine," Fin replied. 

"Keep an eye on this," Olivia told Kat as she walked towards her office. Gotham wasn't too far from New York City, but so far they have never had an issue with criminal overlap save for a few minor members of the Falcone family. She liked to keep it that way. Manhattan had enough problems without Gotham dragging it into theirs. 

As though some higher power read Olivia's mind and decided to give her the exact opposite of what she wanted, the phone rang. Everyone exchanged quick glances until Amanda stood and answered the phone. She listened, replied, and hung up.

"They found a body," she said, her voice grave. "Apparently it's...messed up."

Olivia sighed. There went the peace. 

"Okay, Rollins, you go down there-"

"I'll go too," Kat said, already standing from where she was sitting on a desk. 

"No," she said. "You stay and keep an eye on Gotham. Carisi? You go."

"Got it, Captain." 

As the two detectives grabbed their coats to leave, Olivia felt a chill.

 _This better not be the beginning of something,_ she thought. _Let it just be by the book._

Boy, was she in for a disappointment.


	2. "You Mean to Say this Guy Dresses Up Like a BAT?"

Amanda could tell by the looks on the faces of the members of the local precinct that this was going to be one of Those Cases. The kind that haunts a normal cop, maybe stays with them for life. For Amanda, these things happened nearly every day, it sometimes felt like, so she was actually happy to be the one to relieve these poor bastards of whatever was burdening them. They could walk away from it, SVU couldn't. 

It had been quiet in the car on the way to the crime scene, Carisi's capable hands on the wheel and all. It wasn't like Sonny to be so quiet. Usually he was pointing out some Italian bakery and talking about how they had better cannolis in Staten Island, or talking about some fun, obscure law he had just looked up, or talking about how the Yankees were doing. She could see that his brow was furrowed now, with that confused/sad/confused about being sad/sad about being confused expression that often signaled that he was in deep thought. 

"What's up, Carisi?"

"Huh?" He flicked his gaze to her and back towards the road. Bruce Springsteen played softly on the radio. Amanda leaned over to turn it up.

"You're quiet."

"Turn the radio down, we gotta hear the police radio."

She lowered the volume, more suspicious than ever. Sonny never passed up an opportunity to bash on Bruce Springsteen in favor of Sinatra. "That's a real guy from Jersey," he would often say. Amanda had always thought Frank Sinatra was from New York, but her Georgia mind learned pretty quickly that to say that was to speak heresy. 

"Okay, what's going on?" she asked him. "You're never this quiet. Especially not when 'Born to Run' is playing."

"Ah.." he waved the Springsteen song away in distaste. "I just keep thinking about this Gotham thing."

"You mean the Asylum?"

"Yeah. A bunch of nutcases escapes and now there's a crazy murder? Do you really think it's a coincidence?" 

"People got killed just fine before those people got out," she replied. 

"I guess," he had said, before lapsing into uneasy silence again. 

The officer that greeted them had been a small woman with a tough face lined with experience. That didn't seem to matter though, her eyes were haunted. Too haunted. 

"She's a working girl from around here," the woman said as she walked with the detectives. "Pretty well known, only picked up for soliciting a few times."

"Any evidence of assault?" Sonny asked. Amanda took note of the small shiver that ran through the officer's body. 

"We...don't know. We called you because of her profession and...well, it's a lot. You should brace yourselves, detectives." 

Amanda had been told that plenty of times in her career, but she didn't expect what she ended up seeing. 

The body was laid out in an alleyway next to a dumpster, a pretty regular dump site for these types of murders, but this immediately was different. Red painted the side of the dumpster, the walls of the alley. It pooled beneath the cooled corpse of what Amanda could really only guess was a woman, due how poorly the body had been treated. Her eyes jumped over it, noting a hand here. Hip bone there. Hair. Blank eyes. Her mind did not want to see the rest. In the corner of her eye, she saw Sonny cross himself. 

The woman might have once been African American, but she couldn't tell for sure due to the ashen blueness of the corpse and the...well, the markings. 

"We think it was a scalpel," the officer said, not looking at the body. 

The markings started on her forehead, decorated her cheeks, her neck, down her chest and across her arms, legs. This obliterated her features save for her mouth, which was cut into a wide smile. Amanda saw Sonny look away. 

"Are these words?" Amanda asked. The officer nodded. Amanda knelt by the corpse and studied the markings. They were words. They were all a single word. 

_Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!_

Over and over.

Finally, Amanda looked away. 

*

"Cause of death was exsanguination," Sonny said back in the squadroom. He stood in front of a whiteboard pinned with pictures of the Jane Doe. "The cutting started while she was still alive." Amanda stood by his side, and he liked that. He liked knowing she was backing him up as always.

There were days, he thought, when she was so close to him. The days when he would go to her apartment and cook up a meal ("Anything but veal", Amanda insisted) and he would hold Billie while Jesse played at Amanda's feet. It was a homey feeling. They had many days like that, but there was an equal number of days when she would withdraw, pick up some guy at a bar and go off to his place. She would fixate on some new detective that would momentarily help them with a case and Sonny would feel like he didn't exist to her. He never brought it up. He didn't want to lose the good days. 

Olivia stood and studied the pictures, her face held an expression of poised horror. She had seen a lot of things, too many things, but she had never seen anything like this. 

"This happened last night?" she asked. 

"Early this morning," Amanda replied. 

"We think she might have been, you know, workin', and then picked up the wrong guy."

"The super wrong guy," Kat chipped in. She sat on the table in the conference room, keeping one eye on the whiteboard an another on her phone, where she was picking up the latest news from Gotham.

"The cutting around the mouth is called a Glasgow Smile," Fin added. "That's gang stuff, that's messed up."

"So you think that this is gang-related, Fin?" Olivia asked. Fin shifted in his seat, his eyes looking up at the corpse on the whiteboard and back down again. 

"I don't think so," he said. "Unless this chick really pissed one of them off, I don't think they would have gone...that far. Not anyone in New York, anyway."

"Any evidence of sexual assault?" Olivia asked Sonny. He shifted his weight on his feet. Kat had turned her entire attention to what was going on on her phone. Normally, Olivia would call her out on it, but the way her face looked, she might actually be coming up with something big. 

"We don't know, Captian, the ME said that...there wasn't...much to test." His face twisted in disgust. "Not much left there, if you understand what I mean."

"Unfortunately yes." Olivia felt queasy. Kat jumped up.

"Guys, I think that there might be something here."

"What do you mean?" Olivia asked. 

"Well-"

The phone rang again.

And again. 

*

Two days later, they were looking at three different corpses, all the same MO. Each body had been stripped naked, a smile cut into their face, laughter cut into their body so much that very little blood was leftover. The difference, however, lay in the victims. 

The first was a Jane Doe, a sex worker who was almost impossible to identify, and none of the girls were talking. 

The second was Mrs. Harriet Walker, an 85-year-old widow who lived alone. She had been found in her apartment after the neighbors living below her complained about the strange stain spreading on their ceiling. 

The third had been Officer Margie Garret, 11th percent. The killer had gently folded her uniform and left it beside her in the middle of Bryant Park. 

The pictures of these unfortunate women were all up on the whiteboard, but that was not what Olivia was staring at. 

She was staring at John Doe, the alleged suspect, the person that Kat had found mention of on twitter. She had found him from a list of released criminals from Arkham, and well, one of his MOs matched what was going on, or at least the theme. 

The man might have been handsome were he not so horrific to look at. Chemical burns had bleached his skin white, and he smiled in his mugshot with an overexaggerated grin. The chemicals had also turned his hair green, and he wore it slicked back almost in the same style as Carisi, although if anyone else thought it, they didn't say it out loud. 

"They call him the Joker," Kat had explained to the squad. "The 'Clown Prince of Crime'. He's just one of the many crazy criminals that got out in this escape."

"What's down in the water in Jersey that they have this kinds of psychos?" Fin asked, although no one answered. What the hell could they say?

"Well, he does a lot of stuff, sometimes uses gas to kill people with smiles. He's big on...clown stuff."

"Clown stuff," Carisi deadpanned. 

"Hey, that's not the weirdest guy in the place," Kat said, almost defensively. "They got a guy named 'Oswald Cobblepot', and if that wasn't weird enough for you, he calls himself 'The Penguin'. One of the guys who stayed behind went by 'The Calendar Man'."

"What, did he kill people with calendars?" Amanda asked. 

"No," Kat replied. She was enjoying this role as "expert of Gotham weirdos". "He committed crimes on certain days of the year."

"Oh, I guess he only tries to escape on Independence Day," Amanda said.

"Or Leap Day," Sonny added. 

"Okay, okay, well, there's a chance that this...joker might be in Manhattan now, so I want this picture circulating around every precinct, and that includes the other Burroughs," Olivia had to put her captain's hat before this actually became a circus. "Kat, I want you to get as much information as you can on this guy, maybe contact Gotham PD to see how he was caught the last time."

"Oh, I already know that one," Kat said. "Batman did it."

The squad fell silent, confused. Fin finally broke it. 

"The _what?_ "

"Batman. He's a sort of vigilante kind of guy, dresses up and goes out and fights crime when cops down there can't."

Silence again. Kat was beginning to wonder if they thought she was crazy.

"You mean to say this guy dresses up like a BAT?" Sonny asked. "A bat? Like. the furry little blind guys with wings?"

"Bats aren't blind," Amanda said. "They just rely on echolocation more." 

Everyone turned to look at her. 

"What? I liked animals as a kid." 

"Fine. Okay. Well, we don't work with vigilantes," Olivia said. "We're doing this by the book. Contact Gotham PD and let's try to get some information, okay?" 

Everyone murmured in agreement, everyone but Sonny. 

"A bat though? Like? With ears?"

Kat held up her phone, on it was a picture of a man dressed in what looked like black armor, pointed ears adorned the mask on his head. His cape flared out against the night sky, and clearly printed on his chest was a stylized bat symbol, black against yellow.

"Yeah," she said. Olivia leaned in and studied the picture. She looked back over to the image of "The Joker". 

"This is going to be a case for the history books," she said. 


	3. The Unfortunate Circumstances of Ex-DA Harvey Dent

"Gotham, huh?" Rafael Barba placed his suit jacket on the back of his desk chair, unbuttoning his sleeves so he could roll them up as he walked over to the espresso machine that he kept on one of his many shelves. Olivia watched him in his constant movement, knowing that he wasn't going to slow down just because she was talking to him. Sonny, beside her, held two cups of coffee in his hands. One of them was supposed to be for Rafael, but now he just felt stupid as he watched the ADA fiddle with the machine.

"Looks like we have an escaped criminal who came from there," she said. Rafael took the small cup of espresso and gestured to Sonny. Confused, Sonny stood there. Rafael sighed and took the extra cup of coffee from his hand. 

"You always leave room for cream," Rafael mumbled as he sat at his desk and removed the top of the blue and white cup. "Like anyone has time for that." 

Olivia and Sonny watched as he poured the espresso into the cup of coffee. 

"Wow." Olivia heard Sonny mutter under his breath. Rafael gave another gesture that meant "keep explaining what you came here to explain" as he opened a file containing one of his many cases for the week. 

"Well, we've done a little digging on some of the people in Arkham, and we found something kind of interesting," Olivia said. 

"Well, they're all interesting down there. Except for the mafia. That's boring."

"We found _you_ , Rafa."

Rafael paused. 

"Why didn't you ever say you were an ADA down in Gotham?" Sonny asked. 

"It's not something that I like to talk about, those criminals down there were repugnant. It makes Manhattan look like West Palm Beach, not to mention the theater scene..."

"You prosecuted a lot of criminals down there, a lot of them escaped. I wanted to swing by and see if you had any insight to offer." Olivia handed over the file on the recent murders. Rafael opened it, grimaced, and took a larger sip of coffee. 

"And why is he here?" Rafael waved his coffee cup in Sonny's direction. Sonny gave a nonchalant shrug. 

"These criminals are different than the ones we got up here," he said. "I thought it would be educational to hear about how you go about gettin' these guys."

Rafael looked amused. "Educational, eh? Do you know why I left Gotham, Carisi?"

Sonny looked dumbstruck as though he had been asked a trick question. "I just learned that you were even there, Barba."

"I left after the District Attorney had a bit of an accident, didn't want to end up like him."

"Something happened to Gotham's _District Attorney_?" Olivia sat down in one of the chairs in front of him. She didn't exactly know why this was surprising, Rafael was threatened all the time, but he was just an ADA, the District Attorney usually had more protection. Rafael leaned back in his chair a bit, savoring coffee and the memory. 

"Harvey Dent," he said with reverence, dripping with a little regret. Sonny jumped up in his seat a little bit, gripping the armrests. 

"Harvey _Dent?_ You worked for _Harvey Dent_!?" 

"The very same."

"Wait a minute," Olivia broke in before Sonny could fully geek-out. She knew that Rafael loved it when Sonny acted like an excited schoolboy, even if he would never admit it. "That name does sound a little familiar, didn't something happen to him in court?"

"They mentioned it in law school," Sonny said. Rafael chuckled. 

"Good to know Forham Law Night School is keeping up with current events," he said. "But it was years ago now, he's...very different."

"Yeah no kiddin', he's-"

Rafael's face grew stony. "I know what he is, Carisi."

"Well I don't!" Olivia tossed up her hands. "I also don't know what this has to do with my case."

"Maybe nothing," Rafael said, placing his coffee cup down and steepling his fingers. "But it's helpful to know about him if you want to get mixed up in anything Gotham."

Oliva sat back. "Go on then."

"Harvey was...a golden boy. Beloved by all. Harvard, Harvard Law, they begged him to teach there but he wanted to go out and do some good in the world. That landed him in Gotham, which, frankly, needed it. I was an up and coming attorney back in those days, feeling the same way. God, Harvey was good. The problem is, he went for the big guys."

"What, like Batman?" Sonny was painfully interested in this Batman guy.

Rafael laughed. "He started before Batman, and we all thought he was going to outlast Batman, but no, while all those colorful freaks were doing ridiculous things, Harvey thought he could rip out the beating heart of crime in that city, starting with the Falcones."

Sonny furrowed his brow. "Weird, Falcone is my-"

"We've had dealings with some low-level Falcone family guys in the past," Olivia said. "They're familiar to us."

"Well, they were the last 'real' criminals in that city. They were untouchable, it was impossible to get anything on them, but Harvey kept trying. The Joker would rob a bank in a crop duster but Harvey kept showing up at weddings, writing down license plates of the criminals who would attend them. Got him bloodied up a few times. Gordon could barely keep him from going out and getting himself killed on a regular basis. Around this point, people started getting killed. Falcone's people. There was always some...holiday thing left behind at the crime scene. They were always killed on a holiday. Guess what they called the killer?"

"Calendar Man?" Sonny ventured.

Rafael laughed. "Julian Day? No. I prosecuted him myself, actually. He was in Arkham by then, although I really don't know what all the fuss was about with him compared to some of the other guys out there. No, they called him Holiday."

"Original," Olivia said. 

"Very. People waffled on the whole thing, some wanted him caught, others didn't. it's hard to argue with a guy who keeps going out and murdering the bad guy for you."

Olivia sighed. "Another vigilante? Or was this also Batman?"

Rafael shook his head. "Batman didn't kill, probably still doesn't. That wouldn't be..." He grinned. "Lawful."

"Good to know the bat guy's got a conscience."

"Maybe, anyway, finally Harvey somehow gets the stuff he needs to finally arrest Falcone, I personally don't know how and would never assume that the chain of evidence was ever broken by one such as Harvey Dent, but I know he got it. He started small, knocking people down one by one, and finally he gets this guy on the stand..."

Rafael fell back into his mind a little bit at the thought of it. He wasn't part of the case, it was too big for him, but the law clerk who had been assigned to help was a joke. He had sat in the back of the gallery watching Harvey, movie-star handsome with aspirations of becoming mayor, cross-examine the guy. The guy himself was just a smudge in Rafael's memory, a cog in a much larger machine that would be Harvey's undoing, but he could still remember how it felt to sit in the courtroom that day. The horrible realization came when one realizes that history is being made. Not good history. 

"Rafa?" Olivia prompted. 

"Oh, sorry," Rafael sat up straighter, pulling himself out of his own thoughts. "Why don't you take the rest, Carisi?"

Sonny was eager to share his knowledge. "So Harvey Dent is talking to the guy, right? And then all of a sudden the guy starts coughing, and then something gets thrown, and Harvey falls over. I saw a video of it in law school. It was like a warning to us all. Harvey pitches over and it turns out that it's acid, right?"

Olivia grimaced. "He got acid thrown into his face?"

"Not his entire face," Rafael said. "Only half."

He grew quiet then. Sonny took that as his cue to continue. "So he went nuts, just like all the guys that he was trying to put away. Half of his face was messed up for life. I forgot what they called him after that..."

"Two-Face," Rafael said quietly. 

"But that's not the crazy thing," Sonny said. "Turns out? He was also Holiday."

Olivia said nothing, but her raised eyebrows said enough.

"Albert Falcone is Holiday," Rafael said firmly. "He's the one in jail for it."

"Yeah but-"

"Anyway," Rafael said stridently. "That's basically Gotham in a nutshell. Looking at these photos...well, it has Gotham all over it. I'd think you were looking for the Joker. He likes..." Rafael curled his lips in delicate distaste. "Laughter." 

"Okay, well, he's a distinctive looking man," Olivia said, more to herself than to others. "And we have pictures of him all over New York City so it shouldn't be long until we hear something."

"I don't know, Liv, the Joker's a slippery one. if he's out and about, more chaos is going to follow. He's not an incognito guy," Rafael said. "Have you spoken to Jim Gordon yet?"

Olivia remembered him being mentioned in the story about Harvey Dent, but shook her head. "And he is?"

"The Commissioner of Gotham Police," Rafael replied. "Good man, widower, and it's a shame of what happened to his daughter..."

"His daughter?"

"Barbara," Rafael explained. "Was hurt very badly by the Joker. He'd have a vested interest in bringing the Joker in."

Olivia could hear another story in his words, but she was afraid to ask. Was Jim Gordon going to be another loose cannon she would have to work with? Between Kat and Amanda, she already had her work cut out for her, she didn't need more people to fight against. Before she could ask for elaboration, her phone rang. She glanced at the screen and saw Kat's name.

"I have to take this," she stood up, turning her back to Rafael's desk just as Sonny leaned over and asked "You ever meet the Riddler?"

"Of course you'd find that idiot interesting," Rafael sighed. 

"What's up, Kat?"

"Listen, I just got off the phone with Commissioner Gordon," Kat's voice crackled down the line.

"Oh? What did he say?"

"They have him."

Something surged in Olivia's chest, that weird excited feeling that came when another piece of the puzzle fell in place. "They got him? Who?"

"The Joker," she said. "Picked him up right outside the Pine Barrens. Looks like he was headed back to Gotham. They have him in custody."

"Wow, okay, good work, Kat." 

"What? I didn't do anything."

"You and Rollins start heading down to Gotham, I have Carisi here, we'll meet you. Thanks." 

Olivia hung up the phone and turned back to Rafael and Sonny. "Looks like we're headed to Jersey."

"They got him?" Sonny looked surprised. Rafael looked a little sick. 

"Yup, and we're headed down there to have a little chat. Let's go, Carisi."

Sonny stood up, and surprisingly, Rafael did too. 

"What are you doing?" Olivia asked. Rafael rebuttoned his shirtsleeves and put his suit jacket back on, buttoning the "always" button with a practiced hand. 

"You know nothing about Gotham," he explained. "If you're going to go to my own stomping grounds, I'm going with you. Plus, I have to see what I'm dealing with here, I feel like just placing him in front of a jury is going to guarantee a mistrial." 


	4. "I Think I'll Miss You Most of All, Scarecrow"

Dr. Jonathan Crane heard a sharp CRACK as his face hit the wall. He lingered against the coarse brick for a moment and smiled, feeling the blood run into his teeth. Some people are afraid of pain, the name for that is algiophobia. He let the hands that had slammed him into the wall turn him around. His head felt loose on his neck. Maybe he had a concussion. What was the word for fear of concussions? Was there one? He would have to look it up whenever he got back to the safehouse. 

_If_ he got back to the safehouse. 

Two figures stood in front of him, a boy in red, green, and yellow leather and a woman in purple. Such colors. They made his eyes swim. 

"What happened the other night, Scarecrow?" Robin's eyes were steely behind his mask. It had been a long few days. It had not been easy to find him, it seemed that all of the criminals who had escaped Arkham had scattered like rats in a basement with the light turned on. It was lucky that the Good Doctor was obsessed with rescuing his notes from Gotham University, they had caught him not far away from the campus, lurking. The idiot didn't even realize that the place was being watched. 

Jonathan's eyes rolled his his sockets and Robin held him up against the wall. Catwoman lingered a bit out of his sight. He couldn't see very well without his glasses, which now lay in crumpled plastic on the ground. All he saw was a womanly smear of purple. 

"I'm just taking a little walk," he said, giggling. "Just a little walk back to my old place of employment."

"You're supposed to be in Arkham, Scarecrow." Robin was losing his patience faster than Scarecrow had first lost his sanity. 

"If I recall, the great Asylum of Arkham is now nothing but ashes."

A sigh. "We know. How did it get that way?"

"Fire. I assume. The fear of fire is called pyrophobia, you know. I'm a little afraid of fire."

This line of questioning was going nowhere, so Robin decided to switch tactics. "We heard a rumor that some of your fear gas was being trafficked into the city the night Arkham burned, do you have anything to say about that?"

Jonathan opened empty hands. "My only regret is that I did not patent this fabulous gas, but alas, like Jonas Salk, I gave my gift to the world for free."

Robin exchanged looks with Catwoman. "So you're saying that you don't know."

"When you put something out into the world, you should not be responsible for what happens when others use it. Nobel should have realized that when he invented dynamite. But what did he do instead? The peace prize. Please."

Catwoman shook her head at Robin. They weren't going to get anywhere. Robin let Scarecrow go. Jonathan ducked down to pick up his glasses, putting the bloody, shattered frames back on his face. Robin and Catwoman stood before him. Robin sighed and reached for the radio that would connect him to the police. 

"Wait," Catwoman said. "He's more useful out right now." 

Jonathan cocked his head. "Am I?"

It was Catwoman's turn to slam him against the alley wall. This time Jonathan was ready for it, and let his upper back take most of the force. 

"Listen, here is what you're going to do, okay?" she purred. "I'm sure a bunch of you are hanging out somewhere, am I right?"

Jonathan smiled. 

"Good. Now I'm going to join you, and as far as you know, I've been dodging Batman for years, and now I want to get in on whatever action you derelicts are planning."

Selina's eyes were blue, but Jonathan's eyes were blue enough to look unnatural. They seemed to fill his face, and Catwoman could tell that he was itching for his mask of burlap. They were wild, they were pretty much always wild. 

Most importantly, they were filled with fear. 

She expected to hear a quick denial, although she would know he was lying. These guys liked to team up all the time. She had teamed up with a few of them, back when she was all the way bad. Luckily, most of them didn't really know her slightly changing allegiance. 

"Okay," he said. "But you have to play nice."

Her lips curled in a smile. "Kitty doesn't like to play nice." 

Robin was already gone, maybe he had left as soon as Catwoman stopped him from calling the police. It didn't matter, she knew where he was going. Bruce had suffered terrible injuries, broken legs, arms, spine. It reminded her of the time Bane had broken his back, and it was possible that it had happened again. She would ask him if he ever woke up. _When_ he woke up. 

Jonathan put his back to the university campus and began to walk, Catwoman followed. After a while, he began to giggle. 

"What's so funny?" she asked. 

"I was just thinking of a joke, you see. When the fire came and freed us all, I remember him passing me as he walked out. He turned and said "I'm going to miss you most of all, Scarecrow", and you see that it was humorous because of the movie. I'm not one for jokes, of course, but that one was particularly funny."

"The Joker has quite the sense of humor," Catwoman said, studying her knife-tipped nails as she walked. 

"Oh no," Jonathan replied. "It wasn't him. He didn't set us free."

**

When Captain Olivia Benson walked into the precinct of Gotham PD, Jim Gordon didn't know what to expect, but he didn't expect her. He knew that a woman who had been in SVU for over twenty years had to be tough, and that radiated off of her, but he hadn't expected her to be so beautiful. The thought made him embarrassed, of course, so he cleared his throat and stood to greet her. 

"Captain Benson? Commissioner Gordon, it's nice to meet you." 

After hearing all the stories of all the criminals in Gotham, Olivia had been expecting the Commissioner to be as, if not crazier than the people he was trying to stop. Instead she saw a good-natured face, an older one but with eyes still bright. He stood straight, as though the only thing keeping his moving was his strong sense of integrity. Or perhaps Olivia was just getting poetic. 

"Commissioner, it's good to meet you too, unfortunate under the circumstances, however." They exchanged a hearty handshake. "This is Detective Carisi, Detective Rollins, and I believe you've already met ADA Barba?"

Jim looked over at the three people accompanying Olivia. A petite blonde woman, a tall man with a three-piece-suit and slicked back hair...and...Rafael!?

"Rafael?" Jim couldn't believe his eyes. "I can't believe you came back for this."

Rafael's expression was tight. "Wouldn't miss it, Jim, I'm sorry we had to have this reunion under such circumstances." He paused. "Is the Gotham Ballet still a joke?"

In spite of everything, Jim chuckled. "I haven't been there since Barbara passed," he said. "She wouldn't have known better than me. Come on."

Jim turned to lead the detectives into the room where the task force had been set up, Rafael leaned over to Olivia as they walked, whispering in conspiratorial tones. 

"Barbara is the name of his wife, and daughter, he also has a son named Jim Jr."

Olivia smiled a bit. "Sure takes the pressure off of coming up with names."

"Yes, but it's hell on storytelling."

The Gotham Police Station was much darker than the station back in New York but seemed fancier as well. The entire place was done with the same art deco touch that swept the city, beautiful gold, silver, and black marble inlays. As they walked, Olivia almost stopped to admire a mosaic on one of the walls. A stylized tower in alternating black marble and gold nearly filled the entire wall. "Wayne Tower", it said. 

"The Waynes have their hand in everything, huh?"

"Wayne," Sonny replied. "There's only one left."

"Bruce will wake up," Jim said with a heavier gravitas than was probably needed for a billionaire playboy. "He has to."

The task force room was filled with pictures. Olivia recognized a few. The Joker leered at her from a pantheon of strange people, including a woman with green (?!) skin, someone dressed like a character out of _Alice in Wonderland_ and not one, not two, but _four_ people who were either severe burn victims or looked like they were made out of mud or clay. Carisi drifted across these photos, stopping at a seemingly normal looking man dressed in a bright green suit dotted with question marks. 

"The Riddler," he said to Amanda, pointing. 

"I don't get your obsession with him," she replied. 

"He makes puzzles, Rollins. His name is Edward Nygma. I mean come'on!" 

"These are the most prominent criminals who escaped from Arkham. Some of them aren't suspects..." Jim pointed at the picture of the green-skinned woman and gestured in the direction of a pale-skinned woman with multi-colored hair. "Mostly because they were nearing release. However, they are still considered relatively dangerous, given the fact that they ran."

"I hear Julian Day is still in custody," Rafael said. 

Jim shrugged. "Whatever good that does us. He's in custody at Gotham Hospital due to smoke inhalation. He's not saying much, only that everyone just sort of...left him behind." 

"Still, he might have seen something. Carisi, when doctors allow it, you should question him. See where he places the Joker in all this."

Sonny nodded, although he was a little disappointed. 

"I hear you have the suspect in custody?" Olivia continued, looking at Jim. Jim nodded, his face deadly serious. 

"Our most reinforced interrogation room. We had to build one for these kinds of people after Poison Ivy tore open a normal room's door with one of her vines."

Olivia mouthed "Poison Ivy" and gave an exasperated sigh. "Right. Of course."

"Can I have a crack at him?" Amanda asked. She had drifted over to the picture of the Joker, grimacing at his horrible smile. There was something weird about him though, something that didn't sit right about all of this. "I don't understand why someone who just had a shot at freedom would then turn around and murder a bunch of strangers."

"You've never met the Joker," Jim replied. 

"I don't know, Amanda," Olivia said sternly. Amanda bristled at the hesitation. 

"Come on, Olivia, you can't trust me by now? After my work with Yates?"

"Yates who escaped prison as well."

"Well I didn't help him!"

"Fine," Olivia said, not wanting to have a blowout fight in front of the commissioner of another jurisdiction. "But you're not going alone."

"Fine." Amanda suppressed the thrill she felt from this. She also ignored the concerned-but-confused-but-concerned-about-being-confused look Sonny was obviously giving her. 

"I'm not going in there," Rafael declared. "But...I would like to watch."

"He's ready for you whenever you need him," Jim said. "He hasn't escaped yet...as far as I know." 

"Good. Let's go now." Amanda turned to Olivia. "May I have the file?" 

Once again, Olivia hesitated. 

"He's killed a person with a pencil before," Jim said. "Just a pencil. We don't like to bring anything in with us when we talk to him."

"Okay. Fine." Amanda was getting a little frustrated. "Lead me to him."

With that, she walked out of the room, leaving everyone behind. Sure, she didn't know where she was going, but what did that matter? Someone would point her in the right direction. Hell, there was probably a neon sign pointing out where he was, right? 

"Carisi," Olivia said. "Go with her."

Sonny did as he was told, although he didn't really want to talk to the guy. Someone who could do those kinds of murders wasn't someone he wanted to be in a room with, but when you're supposed to protect and serve, you don't get to choose. In the hallway, Amanda had already found a hapless member of Gotham PD who looked at her goggle-eyed as she demanded to know where the Joker was being kept. She was already being led away. 

"Rollins, wait up!" 

"I don't need a babysitter!"

"I know you don't, but the Captain wants me there, so I'm there." 

**

The interrogation room looked normal by all accounts, if you didn't consider the extremely heavy metal door, the extra-thick and smooth walls. The lack of windows. There was still a one-way mirror, but the glass was triple thick and distorted the view a bit. Sonny guessed it was probably bulletproof. It felt usually warm. 

"You keep it this hot to make them uncomfortable?" Sonny asked the cop. 

"Nah," the Gotham cop replied. "We got a guy who's super cold. It keeps him kinda weak. Like the opposite of a snake."

Sonny didn't know how to respond to that. 

Amanda ignored them, staring instead into the interrogation room where the Joker sat. 

In-person, he didn't seem that bad. The room was bare except for a table and two chairs that were bolted to the ground. The room was lit starkly from above, so with his head down, it was hard to see his face. They did see the shock of green hair, the pale, no, white limbs. His face was buried in his hands. 

"You ready?" Sonny asked Amanda. 

The Joker raised his head. 

The picture did not do his face justice. Equal parts repellent and handsome, his mouth, even closed in the frown it was now, seemed too fleshy and large for his face. His eyes looked so tired, with heavy bags that made his green eyes look comical. He had been stripped of whatever he was wearing before he had been caught, and instead wore a dusty Arkham-regulation uniform of white and grey stripes. He was a portrait of a sad clown who had made it to prison somehow. 

But then he smiled. 

Immediately his face changed, the spark in his eyes ignited, the dark circles deepened them into pits of emerald madness. His fleshy mouth split into a large, ruby smile, exposing what seemed to be too many teeth. With his face raised, he looked directly into what he should know was his reflection, but were actually right into the eyes of Amanda Rollins. 

"Rollins?"

Amanda clenched her jaw. 

"Let's go."


	5. Too Bad "Catwoman" Is Already Taken

Kat thought it was stupid that she had been left behind in New York City with Fin to keep an eye on things. With the nightmare going on in Gotham, not much was happening besides several scared people calling into the station fearing that the madman was right outside of their apartment. She couldn't tell them that a suspect was already in custody since Olivia would probably have her head if she did, so instead, she had to tell people not to worry when they should be worrying more. 

"This is stupid," Kat said. Fin did not look up from the game he was playing on his cell phone. 

"Count yourself lucky you're not down there," he replied. "That whole place is crazy." 

"Yeah, but we're supposed to be stopping crazy. A whole sanitorium just spilled out a bunch of criminals and we're supposed to sit here and do nothing? They could be planning something big."

"That's Gotham's problem."

"It's bigger than Gotham. Do you think Batman's showed up yet?"

At this, Fin raised his head to look at Kat. His face, permanently unimpressed, looked even more unimpressed than usual. "I doubt he will."

"Yeah? What makes you say that?" 

Fin chuckled. "Batman disappears around the same time that rich guy goes into a coma? That's no coincidence."

"You think Batman had something to do with Bruce Wayne's skiing accident?"

Fin gave a look that just said "Seriously?". 

"Yeah, something like that," he said. 

_Does Fin think that Batman is Bruce Wayne?_ Kat wondered to herself. _That's beyond crazy._

She didn't have time to dive too deeply into Fin's absurd guess as her phone dinged. Thinking it to be Olivia, she glanced down only to see that it was a direct message from Twitter. Weird. The message was from someone called Cornelia D'Arte. It sounded weirdly familiar.

**Hey Kiddie-Kat! You're asking the right questions to the wrong people! it's hilarious! Why don'tcha come down to Gotham if you're so curious about where all the bad boys went!**

Attached to the DM was a picture of an extremely pale woman (pale like the Joker, Kat observed), hair in pigtails, one-half black, the other red. Her eye makeup and lipstick were smudged, and she was showing an...interesting amount of cleavage in the selfie. Something green lingered in the corner of the frame, was that a plant? It also sort of looked like a leg. Someone wearing tights?

She typed back. 

**Who are you?**

**Wouldn't you like ta know!**

Kat didn't understand why this person was phonetically spelling out what seemed to be an extremely exaggerated Brooklyn accent in her DMs. 

**Let's just say we have a vested interest in stopping whatever's going on.** This DM was a little different from the other ones, for one, it sounded like it was written by an adult. **If you want to come to Gotham, come, but don't come as a cop.**

"Hey..." Kat began, looking over to Fin. Fin looked up from his cell-phone game. He was on an insanely high level of Candy Crush, and this stuff got more complicated with each level. He didn't have time for whatever Kat was about to say. 

"What?"

Kat stood. "Nothing," she said. "I'm going to go home. Page me if something big comes up."

Fin snorted the lines of "like that'll happen", and looked back down. 

**Where should I meet you?** Kat messaged. **And what should I dress like?**

Kat was already halfway home before she got a reply. **Dress however ya want! Too bad Catwoman is taken or you could do that!**

"What?" Kat whispered to her phone. She thought about what the woman in the photo had been wearing. The entire thing with the Joker. 

Her footsteps slowed and changed direction, walking away from her apartment and towards the nearest costume shop. 

**

Through his years as a detective, Sonny had the occasional "feeling" about a criminal. He could tell there was something not right with the person, and usually, his hunches turned out to be close to the mark. This Joker guy though, he was off the charts. Chaos seemed to radiate off of him, and he felt sick as Amanda took her seat across from him. Sonny crossed his arms over his chest and stood, his back to the mirror. 

The Joker had admired Amanda as she entered the room, his eyes never leaving her face (if they had drifted anywhere else, Sonny might have punched him). She brushed her sleek blonde hair out of her eyes and folded her hands in front of her. The Joker did the same, with the notable exception of his wrists being handcuffed to the table. 

"Why hello," the Joker said. 

"Hello," Amanda replied, starting soft. "I'm not going to insult you by asking if you know why you're here." 

The Joker smiled in a way that felt like the opposite of mirth.

"It wouldn't be an insult at all, dear lady, indeed I am very confused about it myself, however, I have a request."

Amanda's eyes were cold. "It's not good for you to start with requests right off the bat, you know," she said. 

"Oh, I know, trust me. I've been here more times than you have," the Joker chuckled coldly. "But I would like to ask that gentleman to leave." He finally looked over at Sonny. 

To Sonny's credit, he didn't flinch, he worked very hard to not give anything away that may tip off the Joker one way or another. To a normal criminal, they would just see another cop, but to the Joker, he saw an opportunity. 

"I don't think that's gonna happen," Sonny said evenly. 

"Matched set? Cute." The Joker's grins were like the flashing of a knife. Quick, but dangerous. "It's only that I'm ever so jealous of those clothes. They took mine, you see, and I do hate it when I'm underdressed."

Sonny looked down at the grey three-piece suit he was wearing. Grey suit, white shirt, navy, and grey striped tie. Sure, it was made by the best tailor in Staten Island, only a few blocks from his ma's house, but Sonny had never seen a person _jealous_ of that before. Perhaps he had been spending too much time with Rafael, with his hourglass suspenders and pastel ties. 

"Sorry," Amanda explained. "That's just how it's going to have to be."

"Fine," the Joker replied. "I'll stew in my agony. Now, why am I here?"

"You know why you're here."

The Joker gave an exaggerated frown and moved to get more comfortable, a bit difficult due to the confinement of his hands. 

"Okay, so I escaped," he said. "That's nothing new, I escape more than I stay at Arkham!"

"Escaped? You burned the entire Asylum down! Not only did several high profile criminals escape, but hundreds were killed!"

The Joker sat back in his seat. "That's a terrible shame, I hope Freeze got out, great guy. Little cold of course but couldn't be helped." 

Amanda looked over at Sonny. Showing concern over another prisoner? Interesting. 

"However, I did not set the fire, I merely took advantage of the options presented to me."

"Well, that sounds like a problem for Gotham PD, we're here from New York City."

The Joker's eyes lit up. "Ah! The city that never sleeps! I've always liked that. When things get too quiet around here, things get too dangerous. But in New York City, everything is bright and alive at all times! Like a circus! I don't know if you can tell this about me, dear lady, but I love a circus." 

"You been to New York recently?" Sonny asked. The Joker once again fell into an exaggerated frown. He nearly looked contrite. 

"Unfortunately, no, I've recently been incarcerated and then, after that, I was incarcerated again."

Amanda leaned forward, causing Sonny to unconsciously take a step closer to her. He didn't like her getting too close to this psycho.

"They found you in the Pine Barrens, headed back to Gotham. Where were you comin' from?" A little Georgia slipped into her words, as it did sometimes. She could see the Joker note it with interest. 

"I can tell you that I was in fact near the Pine Barrens," the Joker said. "But I will not tell you why. All you can do is trust that I had nothing to do with New York City, or whatever happened there."

"What happened there? Three people are-" Amanda turned and shot Sonny a look over her shoulder that clearly said, "shut the HELL up and don't give out information to people of interests". Sonny went quiet. 

"You two have quite the rapport," the Joker observed. 

"Shut up," Sonny said. 

"So you left Gotham City, but didn't go to New York, and you won't tell us why?" Amanda summed up the conversation. 

"Yes. By the way, you never told me your names." The Joker looked from Sonny to Amanda. "It's only fair since you know mine."

"We don't, we only know you are the Joker."

"A name is a name is a name," the Joker replied. Three knocks sounded into the room, calling Sonny and Amanda out of it. They were both surprised. The Joker hadn't lawyered up, they could keep questioning him no problem, right? Sonny stood by the door and waited for Amanda.

"My name is Detective Rollins."

The Joker giggled a bit. "Rollins on the floor laughing!"

"That's a bit of a stretch," she replied. 

"Come' on," Sonny said, and Amanda stood to follow him out. The Joker watched them go, or he at least watched Amanda. 

He always did have a thing for blondes. 

*

"It's weird that you're only allowed a certain amount of time with him," Sonny said as they walked into the Gotham Hotel, a nice looking place not too far from the station. If they were going to solve this mystery, they needed a place to sleep, and although this hotel was a little expensive for their tastes, it had all been paid for by the "Wayne Justice Trust", whatever the hell that was. That was Gotham, though. If it didn't have "Gotham" or "Wayne" attached to the name, was it even considered a building? 

"The Joker has a bit of a history when it comes to people interviewing him," Rafael explained as he passed out hotel keys. 

"What, driving them nuts?" Amanda asked. 

"Well...yes. One of them actually became a criminal herself, if memory serves."

Sonny glanced at Amanda. He didn't like the sound of that, and if he didn't, Olivia liked it even less. 

Amanda was not a fool, she glared at the two of them. "Really? You think I'm that weak? That stupid?"

Olivia and Sonny didn't say anything, Rafael snorted. "Dr. Harleen Quinzel had a PHD and she threw it all away for that criminal. It's not a matter of smarts." 

They may have had a point but Amanda did not want to concede it. Instead she was quiet in the elevator on the way up to their rooms. Whatever the Justice fund was, it was generous. Each detective had a room of their own. Sonny's was across from Amanda's, Rafael's was across from Olivia's. They all passed on going out for dinner, said their good nights, and closed the door. 

There's a certain amount of tension people feel when entering a new place, that hint of the unknown, the strangeness of a new place. For those in law enforcement, there was always that small fear that someone would be waiting for them. Luckily, Sonny, Amanda, and Olivia returned to empty rooms. 

In Rafael's, someone was sitting on his bed. She wore jangling bracelets, her raven black hair was a mass of waves. She leaned back and looked over at him, her lips curling into a smile. 

Rafael was not an easily rattled man, he stood there, the picture of calm, even if disbelief tore through him.

"Selina?"

She smiled like the cat who ate the canary. 

"Rafael," she purred. "It's been a long time." 


	6. Now is a Great Time for a Comic Misunderstanding

Olivia smiled at Noah's digital face as it smiled back on her phone. She hated being away from him for so long, but Lucy was wondering with him, and Olivia felt safe when she could be there even if Olivia could not. 

"Hold on!" Noah cried, propping the phone up against something in his bedroom. He backed away so Olivia could see his entire body. "I wanted to show you what I learned in dance class!" 

"Alright, let's see it!" She watched her son do a near-perfect pirouette. He was honestly getting very good at it. It filled her with pride. She clapped for him, and he grinned a grin that showed off another lost tooth. When had he gotten so old? 

"Catching the bad guys?" he asked her. 

"Always," she replied. 

They said their goodnights and I-love-yous, and afterward, Olivia lay back on her hotel bed. Her room was connected to Amanda's, and she could hear a similar conversation going on between Amanda and her eldest daughter through the wall. She wondered if Sonny had figured out that one of his doors could open into Rafael's room. She smiled at the idea that he would talk Rafael's ear off for most of the night about Harvey Dent and law theory. Rafael was hilarious when he was annoyed. 

Her momentary peace was disturbed by the ringing of her phone again. Commissioner Gordon? She sat up.

"Commissioner! Hi!" 

"Hello, Captain Benson, this is Jim Gordon...oh, jeez, you already knew that."

"Caller ID, Commissioner," Olivia couldn't keep the smile from her voice. 

"Right. Well. I'm just down at the station and have a bunch of old police files on the criminals that escaped Arkham. Since the Joker is swearing up and down that he's not the guy, I figured we, I mean, you, or we, if you'd like, could look over the files to see if anyone of these guys could be good for it. You could come down to the station or..."

"Why don't you bring the files here, Commissioner?" Olivia said, feeling a rush of excitement. "We can go over it here, I'll order a pizza. You can tell me how you've survived Gotham for this long."

The smile could be heard in Jim Gordon's voice. "I like pepperoni."

"Good," she replied. "I do too."

*

Selina stretched out on Rafael's bed like she had been there a hundred times before. Years ago, a lifetime ago, she had, but that had ended when his career in Gotham ended. Now she sat with those blue eyes staring up at hi, expecting what? 

"How did you know that I was in town?"

She gave a throaty chuckle. "You know that I watch the news, right?"

"My arrival is on the news?"

"The arrival of a bunch of New York cops is on the news, they had a camera on the police station, watching you all walk in. I could tell it was you by the cut of the suit."

Rafael groaned. "Well then, what do you want? I know you aren't here for a sweet reunion."

Selina studied her nails. "I can mix both business and pleasure, but I did come here to warn you."

"How did you get in here? I know it wasn't through the window."

Selina shrugged. 

"Well, I don't want you leaving through my door, too many eyes in this town."

She sighed at that. "Fine, I'll go through your little cop buddy's door next door. I doubt that little choirboy will mind."

It was then Rafael noticed that his room was connected to Sonny's. "Augh. No wonder Olivia was laughing when we picked rooms. He's probably putting together my opening statement for the prosecution before we even have a guy for sure."

Selina looked up with interest. "I thought you had the Joker in custody?"

Rafael sat in one of the chairs by the window. It was nicely upholstered. Spare no expense, he guessed. "We do, but that doesn't mean anything. The man's a nutcase but we don't know if he's _our_ nutcase." 

"That's the first intelligent thing that you've said since you came into the room, Rafa."

"Don't call me that. Not anymore."

Selina stood to her feet. God, Rafael loved a woman in heels. It was right up there with men who wore plaid button-downs. A weakness. She sauntered over to where he sat, and he didn't move, even as she bent over and put a hand on each arm of the chair. Their faces were very close. He could smell her perfume, musk, and amber. 

"You once liked it," she said. 

"You' said you had a warning? Or are you just here to flirt?"

"Like I said, business and pleasure. I am warning you. The Joker has a plan, that's for sure, but he's not the mastermind of whatever is going on. The other...escapees of Arkham have gathered somewhere, and I think they're planning something big."

"Why did one of them go to New York?"

"Because I think they're planning something bigger than Gotham."

"Terrorism?"

She moved closer to him. "Isn't all crime terrorism?"

"Not legally. But consider me warned. How do you know all of this?"

"You know me, Rafa...I always get myself into trouble..."

He moved in unconsciously, his body doing a dance he had done with her so many times before. 

Then Sonny opened the door between their rooms.

"Hey, Barba...oh." Sonny gripped a three-ring-binder in his hand and stared dumbly at the tableau Selina and Rafael created. She didn't move back, not right away, and straightened up like she was not hiding a thing. Sonny turned red. "I didn't mean to disturb you."

"A Staten Island boy..." Selina purred. "I love it."

"My friend here was just leaving," Rafael explained. 

"Right." Sonny was unconvinced. Selina walked across the from and over to Sonny, her fingers dancing across the collar of his shirt. Sonny turned redder. 

"Fine, I'm just leaving." She said. "Right as the fun starts."

*

After hanging up with her children (mostly Jesse, Billie was too young to talk on a phone yet), Amanda was restless. Part of her thought about going to the hotel bar downstairs, but that was a total bummer to do alone. Olivia wouldn't be up for it, Rafael and she had never really spent alone time together and she didn't want to start now, so that left Sonny. Of course, Sonny had been the first person to come to her mind when coming up with an idea, but she didn't want to go all the way down to the bar...maybe he would be open to raiding the minibar and watching some terrible tv. 

She opened her own minibar (thank you, Wayne Justice Fund, or whatever) and took out the little bottles of liquor. Holding them in her hand, she paused for a minute. 

"Come on, Amanda," she whispered to herself. "It's just a drink."

She thought of the last time they had been in a hotel when he walked her to her door and leaned in. She had moved away then, terrified of ruining whatever perception Sonny had of her. She wasn't the kind of woman that ended up with the kind of man that Sonny was. That's what she told herself when she remembered his lips as they curled a little bit in anticipation of the kiss that never came. Of the look on his face when she had ended up taking a bartender home that night. Didn't he see? 

All Amanda knew now was that she wasn't sure if she could keep turning her head anymore. That thought scared her. She grabbed another small bottle.

"Just do it!" she insisted to herself, and opened the door. Sonny's room was right across hers, and the door was open.

A gorgeous woman in a tight dress stood in his doorway. Sonny kept his head down, his cheeks flushed, as he ushered her out into the hall. 

"You're a sweetheart," the woman said. "Too good for this world." She leaned over and gave Sonny a kiss on the cheek. He waved her away.

"Thanks, I guess."

His eyes darted across the hall and met a startled Amanda's. 

"Rollins?"

"Company so soon?" She leaned against the doorframe nonchalantly, sliding the tiny bottles of liquor into his pocket so he wouldn't see. 

The woman walked down the hallway with grace, she looked like she would be equally comfortable on the arm of a gangster or some fancy diplomat. 

"I uh..." Sonny was tongue-tied, Amanda decided not to punish him.

"Well, good-night," she said.

"Wait! Why was your door open anyway?"

She paused. 

"I thought room service was here, turns out, only yours was."

"Amanda!" 

She didn't want to hear the rest of it as she closed the door. She could hear Sonny shuffle his feet in the hallway and waited for him to close his own door. Once that happened, she crept out into the hall.

if Sonny Carisi is able to meet someone in only a few hours, Amanda Rollins could too. She made her way down to the lounge which was thankfully still open. The bottles still jingled in her pocket, reminding her of her foolishness. What, was she just expecting Sonny to sit around and wait until she decided to make the move? 

There was only one person at the bar, but he took up most of it. She could barely take her eyes off of the impossibly large man. It wasn't that he was cartoonish, he was just...completely jacked. He hunched over a small notepad, feverishly writing something, pausing to take a drink of what might have been a vodka tonic, and then writing again. His hair was cut close to his scalp, and as she took a seat, he glanced over at her. His face wasn't a kind face, but it was an interesting face. She didn't know what to say to get his attention, and ordered a bourbon instead. 

"You must not be from around here," an accented voice said. She looked up. It was the man. She couldn't place his accent, but it was definitely not American. 

"What makes you say that?" she asked. 

"I've never seen a Gotham woman order bourbon before."

As the drink was delivered, she raised it to him in mock salute. "Georgia."

"Ah."

She took a hefty swallow. "My name's Amanda, what's yours?"

"Edmund," Bane said. "You may call me Edmund."


	7. It's a Nice Day for a White Wedding

Ultimately, Kat had settled on a female boxer's costume. She felt comfortable in it, given her favorite pastimes, plus, she didn't feel as ridiculous as she could have been. The train ride to Gotham felt like forever, and we went over the directions to get to where these two women- Harley and Ivy, were willing to talk to her. Gotham cops swarmed the train station, holding pictures and comparing them with each other. For some reason, Kat didn't think any of the fugitives would be stupid enough to try to take a train out of town. Then again, there _were_ a lot of them. 

She walked down the avenue outside of the station, turning left, turning right, heading towards a place called "The Narrows". 

Whenever she went undercover, it never occurred to Kat to be afraid. She had been extremely confident in her ability as a cop in Vice, and now in SVU. In the back of her mind, she did wonder if Olivia would be angry at her again, but this definitely wasn't like the other times. This was bigger than that, more important, and definitely crazier. 

Someone had to do it, so why not her? 

Before entering the Narrows, Kat saw a large statue rising to the sky, perhaps marking the transition from one neighborhood to another. It looked like a man holding a sword, head bent in solemn contemplation. A woman leaned against the base of the statue with her arms crossed. She was obviously the woman from the pictures, ghostly white, with smudged makeup and a bright smile. Her hair was up in pigtails, half red and half black. Her outfit was all black and red leather, with alternating diamonds on the pants. A baseball bat leaned against the statue beside her. 

"You Kitty Kat?" the woman asked, taking in Kat's rather silly costume. "Kitty Kat undercover!" 

"Detective Katriona Tamin," Kat replied. "Are you my informant?"

The woman laughed. "Oh my goodness, sweet pea! You can't just walk up to a gal and ask her if she's your informant! How are you still a cop?" 

Kat stuttered. The woman pushed off of the statue and walked towards her. 

"Don't worry," she said. "I'm your informant, but that's the last time we talk cops, okay?"

Kat nodded, already feeling stupid. "Didn't you have a friend?"

The woman's red lips cracked into a crazy grin. "Ivyyyyy!" She called out towards a rose bush planted next to the statue. "We have a visitor!"

Kat thought this might have been a mistake. This woman was dressed like an S&M clown and was talking to plants, but then she saw it. Something moved near the bush, vines began to grow and tangle and snake around the statue, and a woman emerged from the bush. The roses loved her, growing and twirling around her, trying to wind themselves into her bright red hair. She nuzzled a rosebud with the tip of her nose and it burst into bloom. The woman's skin was a pale green, but not sickly. She wore a crown of ivy leaves that were now wined with roses. In fact, her entire outfit was plant-based, vines draped across and around her body, ivy leaves cloaked her. It would have been shocking if she wasn't so beautiful. 

"Hello," Ivy said. "It's nice to meet you."

"What the hell is going on here!?" 

"Harley," Ivy cut her eyes over to her companion. "Did you not warn our dear friend that things in Gotham are different?"

Harley shrugged. "I thought she knew already! She lives in New York, not Siberia!" 

Kat didn't know what to say, but luckily, she didn't have to say anything as Ivy threw her arm around Kat's neck and they started to walk. Ivy trailed behind. 

"So, we escaped Arkham, but not for the reason you think."

"You two were up for parole in only a few days," Kat said, remembering their pictures on the whiteboard. They didn't really do the women justice, but mugshots never do. 

"Of course," Ivy said. "But the other people who escaped weren't."

"So we decided to bust out with 'em so we could figure out what they were up to!" Harley's ridiculous accent made Kat distantly think of Sonny. Didn't he have a million sisters? Could this be one of them? She tried not to laugh at the thought. 

They were deep in the Narrows now, a crowded slum that was eerily quiet. Occasionally a face would peek out of a doorway and disappear again, scared. Maybe it was Ivy's presence, the woman was a little strange to behold. How did she go around incognito?

"Did you find anything?"

Nervousness flashed across Harley's face. 

"Kinda," she replied. "But I don't think we can stop this one."

"What do you mean?"

Harley bit her lip. "It's kinda going on right now."

*

Amanda crashed against the wall of her hotel room, pulling Edmund as close as she dared. She didn't want to make up too much noise and alert Olivia, it was crazy enough that she had brought this man back to her hotel room after only a few drinks. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw the beautiful woman leaving Sonny's room. She kissed Edmund harder. They tumbled onto the bed. 

"Who is this one?" In the next room, Olivia and Jim Gordon sat at the table by the window, a half-eaten pizza on the bed and files spread out. She picked up a mugshot of a man wearing what seemed to be a luchador's mask. 

"Bane," Jim replied. "The only man who 'broke the bat'." 

Olivia tossed the picture back on the table. "A lot of these have to do with Batman."

"It's more like Batman has a lot to do with these kind of people. Bane...he's a nightmare. Incredibly strong, incredibly smart."

"it's strange that he doesn't have a name listed besides 'Bane'," Olivia observed. 

Jim rubbed his eyes under his glasses. "We don't know if he has one, but we do know he's the son of a man called Sir Edmund Dorrance."

Olivia sighed. "How do you keep your sanity among all of this?" she asked. "I can barely keep my sanity with regular criminals."

He felt so much older than he actually was, and looking at Olivia who seemed so tired on his behalf, he felt even older. "Batman helps, as much as I hate to admit it. But...do you mind if I tell you a story."

Olivia nodded the go-ahead. 

"A few years back, my daughter was shot and paralyzed in my home, and I was kidnapped. By the Joker. It was his intention to make me have 'one bad day', and to see if I would go mad, as he probably did."

Olivia reached across the table to grip Jim's hand. "I'm sorry that happened to you and your daughter."

Jim closed his eyes against the memory, of being forced naked into a cage by monsters with all the same face, the pictures of his daughter naked and in pain. "Batman saved me, and all I could think about was bringing the Joker in."

"It's natural to want revenge."

Jim shook his head. "I didn't want revenge, I wanted justice. I wanted him to come in by the book, it was then that I understood that I was just the type of guy to handle this. I'll always look for justice, it's my way."

Olivia's face grew soft. Her hand still rested on Jim's. "I'm impressed. Something bad happened to me too, and honestly all I could think about was beating that man's face in. Well, a couple of things have happened to me..."

William Lewis' face flashed before her and she blocked it out. The prison guard's face. The horrible man who had held Olivia and a family hostage for money that was not even in the house. All of it was terrible, but hadn't she done most of it by the book?

"There is more strength, I think, in striving to do the right thing even when the wrong thing has been done to you," she continued. "It's difficult, but that's why we're cops, right?"

She was unlike anyone Jim had ever met, and he had met some extraordinary people. 

"Right," he replied. 

**

' _Could you walk a little faster? Said the whiting to the snail, there's a porpoise right behind me and he's treading on my tail!"_ Jervis Tetch, otherwise known as the Mad Hatter, was feeling agitated. The man in front of him was taking to talk to walk forward. St. Lawrence's Church in Gotham was one of the most decorated churches on the east coast. Beautifully constructed in a gothic style, there were persistent rumors that treasures were kept somewhere under the altar. Obviously this had to be the first stop after Arkham, and luckily others agreed. 

The man standing in front of him was not one of the others. In fact, he was the mayor's son. He was dressed in a tuxedo, a picture of a groom. Next to him, in a white dress, was the fiancee of the mayor's son. It seemed right for them to be wed before they shuffled off to their mortal coil. 

Silver glinted at the temples of the unlucky couple. He could make them go where he wanted to, but he knew they couldn't walk yet! Not until the parson arrived! 

"Time time time," the Mad Hatter whispered to himself. "Always running late. They are always running late!" 

Basil Karlo, also known as one of the many "Clayfaces", finally took his place at the front of the church. Oswald Cobblepot, or "the Penguin" began to play a merry tune on the organ.

"It's all wrong," the Mad Hatter muttered. "It's all wrong!"

Strapped to the mayor's son and his fiance were several bright red bands of dynamite. 

"It's a lovely day for a white wedding!" the Penguin declared. 

"But it's night!" someone, Scarecrow, possibly, called from the gallery. 

"Who cares?"

"Nyctophobia is-"

"Silence!" Clayface boomed. The priest who had been watching over the church at night squirmed from his place behind the altar. The Mad Hatter adjusted the calculations on his mind control devices. 

"Shall we?" he called to the front of the church. Clayface morphed into a facsimile of the priest. 

"Yes, let's."


	8. Knockout

The scene at St. Lawrence Cathedral hit the news precisely around the time that Kat, Ivy, and Harley had appeared on the scene. No cops had arrived yet, did Olivia know?

She didn't, in fact, at that very moment she was asleep on the same bed as Jim Gordon, they were fully clothed and had fallen asleep while reviewing files. 

Bane left a sleeping Amanda and crept down the hall, his large bulk surprisingly quiet as he left. 

Rafael dreamt of older days, with Selina Kyle on his arm attending the opera. Going to restaurants. Of her head-turning when a certain Bruce Wayne walked into the room.

Sonny forgot whatever dream he was having as soon as his phone rang. He pitched up in bed, his heart racing. He grabbed it, not even looking at the caller ID as he answered. 

"Detective uh...Carisi speaking," he slurred into the phone, still half in a dream. 

"St. Lawrence Cathedral," a rough voice whispered at the end of the line. Through his haze, it barely registered.

"What?"

"Something bad is going to happen. St. Lawrence Cathedral, you better get here."

"Who is this?"

On the other end of the line, Kat looked over at Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. Olivia would have her ass if Kat was ever discovered...but...

"Knockout," Kat said into the phone. "You can call me Knockout."

Harley squealed with excitement. 

"Now she's gettin' it!" 

"Theresa?" Sonny's voice crackled at the end of the line. "Theresa, is this a joke?" 

Kat did not know a Theresa, but she assumed that it was one of Sonny's many sisters. "No, Detective. ...Even in Gotham, jokes are very serious, and sadly this is neither."

Harley and Ivy flashed Kat a thumbs up at that. 

"What time is it?"

"Oh my god, Detective, no one cares about the time! Just get the cops and get here or else the cathedral is going to explode with the Mayor's son inside! They are going to steal relics, you freaking Catholic!" 

This woke Sonny up more than coffee ever could. Desecrating a church?

"We'll be right there."

Kat hung up and turned to Ivy and Harley. "Good?"

Harley waggled her hand in a see-saw motion. "Good job on the nickname though, it'll come in handy if you're going to roll with us." 

The three of them turned, listening to the wild organ music play inside. Harley huffed. "This is like a Joker prank. Either someone read his dream journal or he put them up to this."

Harley had mentioned a distaste for the Joker many times on their trek to the cathedral, but for some reason now she sounded almost disappointed on behalf of the Joker. Ivy scowled. "Please, all of his best ideas were yours, Harley."

This looked like it made Harley feel better, and not for the first time a thought drifted through Kat's mind. _I'm with criminals._

"Okay," Kat said finally. "I'm going in."

"What?" Ivy asked. "We called the cops, isn't that enough?"

"Not if they don't get here in time. Come' on, you can help me, I have an idea."

*

Both Olivia and Jim's phone rang at the same time, startling the two wake and making both momentarily panic. It wasn't the phone, that they had dealt with enough time. It was finding themselves in bed (no matter how chaste) with the other. 

"Whoa!" Jim said. "Good-" he glanced outside. "Night?"

It was Sonny. Olivia frowned and answered her phone as Jim did the same on his. 

"Carisi, what is it?"

"St. Lawrence's?! How many are there!?" Jim asked on his phone. 

"You got a call from an informant?" Olivia said to hers.

"Did you just say dynamite?"

"The mayor's son!?"

"We'll be right there." Jim and Olivia said at the same time, hanging up their phones in unison. There was a brief moment of mirth before they turned and got ready to face whatever they were about to face. 

The two of them met Sonny and Amanda in the hall, Amanda still sleepily pulling on her jacket and making sure her gun was secure. Sonny hummed with nervous kinetic energy. 

"St. Lawrence's is to Gotham what the St. Patrick Cathedral is to New York. Iconic. Hundreds of Catholics go there for all the important stuff."

"Why would a bunch of Arkham criminals want to do anything there?"

This is where Jim could pick up on the narrative. "They have the Mayor's son, he's been engaged and their wedding is set for June. From what I can understand, they have wired both bride and groom with explosives, planning on blowing up the altar, which has some valuables beneath it." Gritted his teeth.

"Some valuables? They have a solid gold chalice. Some relicts of saints. This is...this is..."

"Heresy?" Amanda asked with a raised eyebrow. 

"Well I wouldn't go that dar but it is damn disrespectful," Sonny replied. 

They started walking and were quickly overtaken by Rafael, buttoning up his cuffs and looking incredibly rumpled. 

"Rafael? You don't need to come to this..."

There was an intensity in his eyes as he looked over at Olivia. "Yes, yes I do."

*

" _See how the lobsters and turtles advance! They are waiting on the shingle, won't you come and join the dance!"_ The Mad Hatter was getting a little excited as he steered the bride and groom to their final destination. A tear trickled down the bride's cheek, although she kept smiling. She should, it was her wedding day. 

As they got to the altar, Priest Clayface gave a half frown. "Why do we need to go through all of this?"

"Because it needs to be PERFECT," The Mad Hatter replied. 

"We promised he could plan this one," Penguin explained from the organ. Clayface sighed. 

"Dearly beloved..."

"STOP!" 

The voice echoed from the rafters, and the Mad Hatter turned his head. Batman? No, it wasn't Batman, it didn't sound like his normal graveled voice. Looking up at the choir box, he saw a woman with a mask, dressed as a boxer, although the gloves hung at her side. 

"Who the devil are you?" Penguin asked. 

"You can't be doing this," Kat said. "It's not right."

Clayface groaned. "Another masked guy? It's like if one falls, another one just takes its place." 

Kat's heart was racing, this was pretty much extra-special illegal, but she didn't care. She could see the two vics from where she stood and she needed to get them to safety. She grabbed the thick vine that Poison Ivy had grown for her (ignoring the fact that it was super weird that she could just grow vines and have them secure themselves to ceilings, but hey, whatever works) and jumped up on the banister. Saying a quick prayer, she kicked off, swinging down towards the villains. Her mind screamed the entire way, panic flooding her veins. She was going to die. This was how she was going to die...

And then her feet hit the tiled floor and she felt safe again. 

Penguin was already gone, having slipped out the vestibule with a grumpy mutter. The priest looked extremely annoyed, but then simply melted into mud and started to slither away. _What the hell!?_ Kat thought to herself. The only people left in the cathedral were her and a short dude with a big hat. 

_"She’s all my fancy painted him_  
 _(I make no idle boast);_  
 _If he or you had lost a limb,_  
 _Which would have suffered most?"_ The Mad Hatter chanted with a tortured expression. 

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Kat asked, before running down the aisle to sock him in the jaw. 

The Mad Hatter fell back, feeling his jaw explode with pain. Distantly, sirens could be heard. 

"I don't think you want to do that, dormouse," The Hatter said to Kat as he held up a switch. "One false move and we all become stars.'

"You think you're fancy with your weird rhymes, but you're not," Kat replied. 

"They are Lewis Carroll!"

Kat shrugged. "Never really liked those books." She punched him again. 

And again. 

For some reason, he couldn't find the switch. Maybe it was all the punching.

*

The Mayor's Son and his bride ran out of the cathedral, freed from their dynamite adornments. Olivia stood there, taking both of them aside while the EMTs checked on them.

"Is there anything you can remember about who did this to you?" she asked them.

"It was the Mad Hatter," the Mayor's Son replied. "He's...kind of hard to miss."

Well, things were at least easy in Gotham. 

"How did you get out?" Jim Gordon asked. 

"Some woman helped us. She tied the Hatter up with a vine or something and then left after making sure we were okay!" 

Amanda and Sonny exchanged looked, drew their guns, and crept inside. A bunch of Gotham cops followed. 

"Be careful!" Olivia called after them. Rafael and Jim stood on either side of her. "Is it always this easy?" she asked Jim.

"It was when Batman was around. This lady? She might be new, or else Poison Ivy's shifted sides again."

The inside of the cathedral was about as beautiful as Sonny had imagined. With Amanda by his side, flanked by Gotham cops, they made their way to the altar, where Jervis Tetch was tied. Whoever the woman was, she was gone, and if anyone had helped Jervis, they were certainly gone as well. 

"You lost your friends now, eh?" Sonny said, his gun raised. "Not if you cooperate, we can probably cut a deal with you, you didn't hurt anyone."

The Gotham cops swarmed Jervis, working to untie him so they could get cuffs on him properly. 

As the vines fell away, Amanda spotted something in Jervis' hands. At the same time, Sonny noticed the pile of dynamite underneath the cross at the front of the church. 

"Story had to end sometime," the Mad Hatter said. Sonny, reacting more than anything else, pushed Amanda behind him as the Mad Hatter pressed the button. 

There was a click. A horrible silence. 

And then everything exploded. 


	9. Turn Me Over, I'm Done on this Side

Olivia sat, tense, in the waiting room of Gotham Hospital. She had been in this situation too many times before when a member of her squad had been seriously injured, but it never got any easier. Jim Gordon sat beside her, stiff with his grief. There had not been many survivors of the St. Lawrence Cathedral explosion, most of them had been members of Gotham PD, along with Jervis Tetch himself. 

"There's no way he came up with this on his own," Jim said when they first arrived. "He had to have help. It had to have been him."

Olivia figured that "him" meant "The Joker".

After a few hours, Amanda came out to wait with them, a fresh wound on her cheek and above her eye stitched together and bandaged. It was the only injury she had gotten from the blast, as Sonny had grabbed her and shielded her for the most of it, and he had pushed them both behind a row of pews, which absorbed most of the blast. 

"Is Dominick okay?" Amanda said as soon as she saw Olivia. There was a jittered quality to her voice, she was shaken. Jesse's voice still rang in her ear after a quick phone call from the nanny who had seen everything happen on television. _I'm okay, baby._ She had said to her daughter on the phone. _Mama's okay._

But was she? She remembered the sound Sonny made after they had taken shelter, the hazy look in his eyes. Was this going to be Mike Dodds all over again?

"He's stable," Olivia said. "But they don't know the extent of the damage. The initial blast burnt him pretty badly." 

"But he's okay, right? He's going to be okay?"

Olivia didn't say anything. Jim was thoughtful and quiet. 

A doctor emerged from the inner workings of the hospital and approached the trio. The look on her face was unreadable. 

"Captain Benson?"

Olivia looked up, her face was lined with worry and weariness. Amanda moved to talk to the doctor herself, but Olivia stood and put a hand on her shoulder, easing her back down.

"I got this, Amanda."

There did not seem to be any good news on the doctor's face. 

"Detective Carisi is going to live, but we're unsure of the full extent of his injuries until he wakes up," the doctor said to her. "We know that there isn't any brain damage."

Amanda sighed in relief from her seat. 

"But the back of him was burned pretty badly, we're going to have to keep him in a medical coma, for the time being, it's easier that way."

Olivia nodded her head gravely, the news seemed to not hit Amanda properly, but when it did, the pain was evident on her face. 

"I mean, can we see him?" 

The doctor looked uneasy. 

"Not yet," she replied. 

Olivia expected Amanda's face to crumple in anguish, but instead, it grew stony. She grabbed her jacket and stood, wobbling a little on her feet, before heading to the elevators. 

"Amanda!" Olivia took off after her. "Where are you going?"

"I'm going to question the suspect."

"Jervis Tetch died in the explosion."

Amanda stood in the elevator and punched the button for the ground floor. 

"Not that suspect," she said as the doors closed between her and Olivia. 

*

It was as though he were waiting for her, sitting in his "special" cell as though he needed it. He didn't mind the excess warmth and lack of sunlight, it was the presumption that annoyed him. As though he couldn't escape from such a childish game. He could escape whenever he wanted to. Of course, he could. 

A large, older man stood across him from, his brow furrowed. His thick hair was threaded with grey, and although he wore a tailored suit there was something disheveled and slightly unhinged about him. The Joker liked him immediately. There was an intensity to his gaze that reminded the Joker of himself, although Gotham Major Crimes Detective Robert Goren hated the comparison. His dark eyes blazed as he looked down at The Joker, who never failed to make eye contact. 

"Bobby," the Joker said. 

"Jack."

Ah, Jack Napier. The name he sometimes used that might very well have belonged to some version of him, the Joker wasn't sure. Robert sure liked to use it against him though. the Joker gave a grin that exposed all of his teeth and crossed one leg over the other. 

"It's very dangerous to be in a cell with me, Bobby," the Joker said. "I'm exceedingly dangerous."

"That never bothered me, Jack. I assume you know why I'm here?"

The Joker chuckled. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Robert sat down beside the Joker, a little too close for the comfort of a normal person, but the Joker didn't mind. He had thought for a short time that Robert might have been Batman, but the man was too tall for the comparison once he met him face to face. He could feel the heat from the larger man, a simmering pot of...something. The Joker hadn't figured it out yet. 

"No sandwiches this time?"

Robert shook his head. "You must be frustrated though, getting caught so quickly."

Interesting sudden parry. "Maybe this was my plan."

"It does conveniently take you out of the narrative, doesn't it?" Robert tilted his head to the side. "Hell breaks loose, and you're just sitting here. It's a good look for a normal criminal, but not for you."

Something rankled in the Joker's heart but he ignored it. This was Robert's trick. He was going to try to trick him into admitting something. Robert had done this to the Penguin enough times that it had become a running joke at Arkham, but the Joker wasn't Penguin. It annoyed him that Robert thought he might be. 

Robert wanted the Joker to admit something about the cathedral. 

"We should play cards sometimes, Bobby, I think we'd both be good at it."

Robert Goren knew that he could probably crush the Joker's skull with his bare hands, but ignored the impulse. Before he could say anything further, there was a frantic banging on the door. They both looked over, confused. They could hear the muffling of an argument on the other side before the door swung open to reveal a small, angry blonde woman. The Joker whistled under his breath. Robert wanted to pound his face into the ground. 

"I need to talk to him," Amanda Rollins said. Robert had heard of her, she worked for Manhattan SVU, and as an alumnus of the NYPD, Robert knew that it required a tough person. Her sharp features seemed sharper than they might have been if she weren't so pissed off. 

Both the Joker and Robert stood at the same time, Robert pushed him back down to sit. He walked over to Amanda. 

"Detective Robert Goren, Gotham Major Crimes. Seems like I beat you here."

The name was familiar to Amanda, she had heard rumors about him throughout the NYPD, going undercover in prisons, being the son of a serial killer (allegedly). He was intense and tall and had already lived up to his reputation by sitting alone in a cell with a psychotic criminal. In another circumstance, she might have been impressed or even excited to meet him. Not now. 

"Detective Amanda Rollins," she said, ignoring his hand. "I need to talk to the suspect about the events at St. Lawrence Cathedral."

The Joker laughed. 

"That doesn't sound like your jurisdiction, Detective," Robert replied, his voice laced with warning. 

"I was in the building with my partner when it happened." Something in her voice gave him pause. He clocked the stitched wounds. The Joker kept laughing. 

"Talk to him," Robert said gently. "But I stay."

Rollins shrugged. "Fine with me."

"Bobby likes blondes," the Joker said. "We have that in common."

Rollins folded her arms as she looked down on him. "There's no way a bunch of cuckoos from Arkham escaped and immediately came up with this idea. How long had y'all been talking about it before the escape?"

The Joker leaned back. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"I think you do," Robert said. 

"Why's that, Bobby?"

"St. Lawrence. He's the patron saint of comedians."

Amanda glanced at Robert, surprise evident on her face. The Joker giggled. 

"Do you know why?" he asked. Robert didn't respond, but Amanda shook her head. 

"Because when St. Larry was being martyred for his glorious cause, they grilled him to death. While on this delicious-sounding pyre, Larry called out to his executioners: turn me over! I am done on this side! Isn't that _hilarious_?"

"Sounds pretty Catholic," Amanda replied. 

"So you chose the location," Robert supplied. 

"How is your friend?" The Joker asked Amanda. "He was pretty annoyed the first time we were here."

Amanda said nothing. 

"That bad, huh? Jervis. He always lacked subtlety. Besides the mind control, of course."

"Tetch is dead," Amanda replied. "I want to know what you know, and what else is going to happen."

The Joker shrugged. "The Cathedral was my brainchild, I'll admit, although they lacked the flair that I would have put into it. I only named a location, the other idiots focused on it."

Robert sensed that the Joker was far more willing to open up to the pretty blonde Amanda, and drifted closer to the door to keep watch. 

"It must have been frustrating to set something up and then have it topple down," he said. The Joker glared at Robert. 

"I would never have set up something so pedestrian. Maybe I just wanted my freedom!"

Amanda sat beside the Joker but left enough room to bolt if he decided to attack her. Like he ever would, he was a gentleman. It's not like she was the commissioner's daughter or anything. He had standards. 

"Is that why you were in the Pine Barrens?" Amanda asked. "For freedom?"

She watched as a million microexpressions fluttered across the Joker's face. He looked as though he were calculating something before he finally spoke. "I was chasing a rumor."

"Oh? What's that?"

The Joker shook his head. "That would be telling, but it had nothing to do with those terrible art projects in your city. Now, let's talk about your unfortunate partner. Did he die?"

Amanda stayed silent, but the slight headshake was enough. Robert noticed and took a step forward. 

"Rollins, don't listen to him, okay?"

"I got this," she snapped. "He's not okay, does that make you feel better to know?"

The Joker shook his head in a great approximation of sympathy. "Of course not, of course not. I do not know the man, but if things aren't looking so great for him, we do have an alternative that will get him up and running in no time!" 

"Jack-"

"Wait," Amanda interrupted Robert. "What do you mean?"

The Joker's eyes glittered in the darkness. "The Lazarus Pit, of course. There used to be many, so many single-use things, but I know of one that was fixed to be used over and over again if need be. It will heal your partner as good as new!"

Amanda looked confused, her eyes flicking over to Robert. Something had changed in the way he carried himself, tension snapped in the room. _It has to be legit_ , Amanda thought. 

"Yeah? Where is it?"

The Joker raised his eyebrows cartoonishly. "Do you think I would just give you the location of a Lazarus Pit without getting something in return!"

"Absolutely not," Robert Goren said. 

"This isn't about you, Bobby! It's about this sweet lady's good friend."

Amanda wasn't an idiot, she knew she would have to play the game to win against someone like the Joker. She wanted to inform him that she wasn't a sweet lady at all, but where would that get her. Instead, she loosened the tightness of her expression.

"I'll have to see what I can do, but how do _you_ know where it is?"

The Joker leaned back. "We talk in Arkham, Bane had a jag a couple of years ago where he tried to destroy all of them, but he didn't manage to find the last one."

"Bane?" Amanda looked over at Robert again for help.

"Another guy from Arkham, we don't have a real name for him but sometimes he travels as Edmund Dorrance. He's probably long gone by now."

Something spasmed in Amanda's head as she remembered the handsome athletic stranger she had taken back to her hotel room barely the day before. His name had been Edmund, right? Had she gotten a last name? Plenty of people are called Edmund, it's not like one of Arkham's notorious criminals would just be hanging out in a hotel bar...right?

If anyone noticed her hesitation, they didn't say anything. 

"Right. Well. What do you want in exchange for this information, Joker?"

The Joker allowed his face to fall into an approximation of sincere concern. "I left Gotham because I was searching for someone. They caught me during the search. I didn't go to the Big Apple at all, I know the person I'm looking for isn't there..."

"Harley Quinn escaped along with the lot of you," Robert said, folding his arms. The Joker scoffed. 

"Harley is what got me into this mess," he replied. "I can't get anything from her now that she's all wrapped up in that Poison Ivy business. A total mess."

"Searching for Batman?" Robert asked. The Joker shook his head again.

"No, I know where he is," the Joker winked at Amanda as he said this. 

"Then who are you looking for?" she asked, growing impatient. 

"My daughter," the Joker replied. "If you help me find her, I'll help you fix your friend. It's a win-win!" 


	10. I'm Like Harvey Dent Now

Bruce Wayne's room at Gotham Hospital was, as expected, the best room in the place. That wasn't saying much as far as hospitals go, but he did have his own private suite in a wing named after his father, with a stern portrait of the very same man looking down at Bruce from the wall. Bruce didn't notice, or maybe he did, Tim Drake didn't really know. 

In the Bat Cave that terrible night when Arkham exploded, Alfred had did what he could, which was more compared to some butlers, but not as much as what Bruce needed. 

"I wish it had only been one big injury, Master Drake," Alfred had sadly told him. "Then it might have been easier."

It was more like several moderate-to-severe injuries, and Tim shifted in his seat as he sat by Bruce's bed. He did this most days, going out as Robin by night to figure out who had done this. His search had been fruitless so far, but luckily someone was curled in the seat on the other side of the hospital bed, watching Bruce with a concerned face, and she had better contacts in the criminal underworld than he did. 

"We should use the pit," Selina said after a long pause. Tim shook his head immediately. 

"He's refused in the past, he'll refuse again," Tim replied. Selina, her black curls tangled as though she had been running her hands through it all night, just looked at him with a flat expression that immediately made him feel foolish. 

"Have you heard about asking forgiveness instead of permission?"

"That would be a little complicated," Rafael said. "Since you would also have to explain how this... 'pit' suddenly cured Bruce Wayne." 

Selina glanced up to see him standing in the doorway. Black circles stood out under his eyes and he was still in the clothes he wore the day before. Tim stood and whirled on Rafael, putting himself between the lawyer and his beloved mentor. 

"Relax, kid," Rafael said. "I'm not here to hurt anyone."

He walked into the room, pleased to have some sort of upper hand on Selina...for once. She looked utterly unsurprised as he looked down at the broken body of Bruce. 

"What are you doing here, Rafael?"

He sighed. "A friend of mine was admitted last night, after the incident at the St. Lawrence Cathedral."

There was a long pause between the three conscious people there. 

"Do you know anything about that, Selina?"

If there was one thing that already drove Selina insane about Rafael, it was his eyes. Green and grassy, they were equal parts smug and curious at all times. She had loved to look into them once, surprised at how much he could guess about her, the cool casual way he expressed his affection. Now those eyes bore into her like she was a defendant on a witness stand. _I swear I'm never dating lawyers again,_ she thought bitterly. 

"I don't know if you want to be a part of this, Rafa."

"One of my closest colleagues is in the burn ward a couple of steps away from extra crispy, I think I do want to be a part of this. I don't think I have a choice."

Selina exchanged looks with Tim.

"It's a long story."

"Just tell the relevant parts." 

Selina glanced at Tim and Bruce, only Tim looked back. She plastered on a fake smile. 

"Why don't we get a coffee?"

*

Olivia was allowed into Sonny's room once he had been stabilized, but she regretted it almost immediately. The injured detective was placed on his stomach, his face was still in relatively good condition save for a few scratches here and there, but his back was a ruin. Shockingly, he was awake, with enough painkillers in him to stun an elephant. He tried to move to see as Olivia walked into the room.

"Don't move, I'll come to you," she said, gently moving the chair for visitors up to his bedside. Sonny's eyes were bloodshot, his normally impeccable hair was a mess. 

"Amanda?" he whispered. 

"She's safe," Olivia replied, placing her hand over his. He winced, even if that particular hand was uninjured, as though he just remembered what damage had been done to him.

"I should have taken that ADA job in Brooklyn," he whispered. 

"I don't think you would have let yourself."

He chuckled, and then hissed in pain as the movement of his muscles overrode the painkillers for a brief moment. "It's bad, huh?"

"We called your family, they should be here soon."

Sonny shook his head as well as he could. "Nah, don't send for them. Not here. It's too dangerous for them. When I get transferred to some New York hospital, they can see me then."

Olivia turned to look at Jim Gordon, who stood in the doorway and nodded. Jim went off to make a few phone calls. 

"He's dead, isn't he?" 

"Tetch? Yeah, he's dead."

A tear ran down Sonny's cheek. "The good guys got out though, right?"

Olivia's eyes grew wet. "Some of them did, the civilians did. You did, Rollins did. You did a good job, Sonny."

She could tell he was thinking about the members of Gotham PD who were now cooling in the morgue a few floors down. 

Sonny laughed, taking Olivia by surprise. 

"I'm okay on one side, fried on the other," he explained. "I'm like Harvey Dent now."

Olivia felt queasy.

*

"No he's not," Rafael said with a laugh. "There is no way Bruce Wayne is Batman, the man is a pampered socialite!" 

"Keep your voice down," Selina hissed, eyeing the waiter who was approaching to fill Rafael's third cup of coffee. 

After the waiter left, Rafael lifted the steaming mug to his lips. "And you're...what?"

"Catwoman."

"Catwoman," Rafael echoed, deadpan. 'You're the cat burglar from all those years ago?"

"I got better," she said sheepishly. "I'm on the side of good now."

"I find it interesting that you think anyone in a costume is on the side of good."

"Good, yes. The law? That's more complicated."

"Isn't it _just_."

Selina had explained as best she could the circumstances she found herself in. Going undercover at the safehouse had tipped her off about the plans villains were making, but no one trusted her enough to spill any details. Selina guessed that's just what happened when you turned your coat enough times. What had become all too apparent was that Gotham needed Batman back, and there was only one way to do it that didn't involve waiting until Bruce got better. 

"Under Wayne Manor, Bruce has a...cave."

"A 'batcave'?" Rafael asked, meaning for it to be a joke. Selina's deadly serious look told him that it wasn't. "Right."

"Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff he's collected over the years, and one of them is called a Lazarus Pit."

It wasn't as though Rafael had never heard of a Lazarus Pit, weird things popped up in the news all the time. He remembered watching a thing on the history channel about them one night when he couldn't sleep. 

"Those single-use only magic things?"

"It's not magic," Selina shot back. "It's...minerals."

"Minerals."

"Anyway, it could heal Bruce, wake him up, and he could come back and fix all of this! And it's not single-use, Talia fixed that a bit back."

Rafael didn't want to ask who Talia was, but the jealous in Selina's voice was all too delicious. 

"If this exists, why hasn't Bruce already been bathed in the waters?" 

Selina's mouth twisted. "He's refused it a couple of times in the past."

"Really? Why?"

She kept quiet. 

"Selina, you have to tell me everything if I'm supposed to help you."

For a moment the fragile mask Selina had been wearing cracked a little. Rafael could see her pain, her fear, how lost she was. He reached over the table and touched her hand. It had felt like decades since he had last touched her so gently, and she gave a little sigh at it. Did she miss him? He hadn't thought that he missed her until he saw her sitting there again, as though they were merely out for brunch after a night at the theater. He wondered if she missed him, or if her superhero billionaire boyfriend had made her forget all about him. 

Something in her eyes told him that at least a part of her still cared. She laced her fingers through his. 

"I try to be good, or at least neutral, but I can't stop everything that's happening. There are others in the city who are trying, but none of us are good enough. None of us are him."

"Then why not use the pit? End his suffering and bring him back?"

Selina paused.

Then she told him why.

*

Robert Goren of course had known about Lucy. It was his job to know things like that. The next morning, after he had dropped Rollins off at her hotel room, he had gone back to his small Gotham apartment to go over his personal files. Lucy Quinzel. Daughter of Harleen. Harley Quinn had disappeared eight years ago, only to resurface a year later. Rumor had it that the Joker hadn't noticed, but clearly that was a lie. There were no DNA tests conducted, and officially Gotham PD did not know about her, but Robert sometimes knew that it was prudent to have a leg up on the more important criminals. He was surprised that the Joker knew about her, last he asked Harley, she hadn't told him. 

He did not live too far from the station, and liked to walk to work in the mornings. Gotham sometimes felt exactly like New York City, with its crowded buildings and strangely elegant way of holding itself even in the dirtiest of places. He thought about Eames and wondered how she was doing. She had mentioned working with SVU on a case after he had left. They still talked occasionally, still met for coffee once or twice a year if they were in the same city, but it was different now. 

Smoke could still be seen on the horizon in two different locations: Arkham to the north and St. Lawrence's to the west. Somewhere he knew that the criminals were waiting, he just needed to figure out how to find them.

"Heyo, Bobby-darlin'!" a familiar voice called out. He stopped, only a block away from the station, and met the slightly crazed eyes of Harley Quinn. "Comin' atcha from Canarsie!" 

She jumped up nimbly and wrapped her arms around his neck, giving him a hug and a theatrical kiss on the cheek. Behind her, Poison Ivy stood, not looking too pleased at the show of affection her girlfriend (wife? Robert couldn't remember) was giving to someone else. Beside her was a woman in what seemed to be a boxing outfit, but the pants and top were definitely the kind of reinforced leather Harley filled her closet with. She seemed profoundly uncomfortable with both her clothing and the current situation. He bent at the waist so Harley's feet could touch the ground again. She let go.

"I didn't think you would answer my voicemail so early," he replied. "You've always struck me as the type of person who sleeps in."

Harley chuckled. 

"Not in these days, Bob. Not in these days."

 _Deese days._ Her accent was still outrageous to him, although he knew she came from Bensonhurst. Maybe she played it up to catch people off-guard? Robert wasn't lying when he came to the conclusion that she had to be smarter than him. They might have been the same level of unhinged if he had tread a different path, though. 

Maybe that's why he kept her on his list of informants. 

"I've been talking to your old friend," Robert said. Harley's face scrunched. 

"That bastard? What does he want?"

"Why don't you introduce me to your friend here first?" Robert looked over Harley's shoulder at the new girl. "Strange time to recruit."

"She came to us! Robert Goren...meet Knockout!" Harley jumped back and threw her arm around the woman's shoulders. "Knockout" stood stiffly, still green...still...

"You're a cop," Robert said. 

"What? No!" Knockout shot back almost too quickly. 

"Yeah, she is," Harley said. 

"Harley!" Ivy looked around. "We're not advertising, remember?"

Harley shrugged off Ivy's words and gave Knockout a noogie over her leather hood. "It don't matter with Bobby! Right, Bobby?"

Robert made a mental note to get Knockout alone to get the real story from her, she probably wouldn't crack in front of her new friends. _She's not from Gotham...New York, maybe? Had to have joined the force after I left..._

"Now tell me what that knucklehead wants!" Harley demanded. 

Robert cleared his throat. "Right here? In front of your friends?"

She sighed loudly. "He doesn't want to get back together, does he? That's like...so over." 

"I mean..."

"Anything you can say to me you can say in front-a Ivy AND Knockout!"

"Harleen..."

"Nope! Nope! Don't wanna hear the first name, Bobby! Harley or bust! Now cough it up!"

"He wants to find Lucy."

It was as though all of the air was sucked out of where they were standing, even though they were outside. Harley's face fell, truly fell, and her cartoon mask was gone. It made her pale, chemically altered face seem sadder and paler than it otherwise might have been. It was grotesque. Poison Ivy lunged forward, pointing her finger at Robert. 

"Don't you dare say that," she hissed. "Don't you dare."

"It's okay, Ives," Harley said quietly. "I figured it was just a matter of time before Mistah J figured things out."

"I thought you should know," Robert said quietly. "But he's in custody, so he won't get very far."

At that very moment, the phone rang. Robert answered it, turning away from the three costumed heroes in broad daylight. He listened very calmly to what was said to him on the phone. 

"I'll be right there," he said. He hung up. He looked at Harley. She could already read it on his face. 

"He got out, huh?" 

Robert reached out to comfort her, but she moved away. 

"Apparently...one of the detectives from SVU helped him to escape."

"From SVU?" Knockout was unbelievable. "No way." 

_Solved that mystery._

"It was either Detective Amanda Rollins, or someone who looks just like her, who helped the Joker escape."

Harley gave an angry scream. 

"What IS it with Mistah J and blondes?!" 


	11. Oh Amanda, What Did You Do!?

Back in her hotel room, Olivia smoothed back her hair, damp from a shower, as she finished her check-in with Lucy. Things felt like they were growing ever more complicated in Gotham City, and they were no closer to finding out who the original murderer was. Now that SVU had been involved with what amounted to a terrorist attack in Gotham, it didn't seem as though they were going anywhere anytime soon. Especially with Sonny the way he was. She shivered at Sonny's resolute sadness over his fate. If he ever returned to policing, it would have to take a long time. Maybe it had been a good idea for him to take the bar after all... 

Her thoughts were interrupted by her phone again. Fin. Did he find something?

"Hey Fin," she said as she answered. 

"Hey Liv, we have a bit of a situation here.'

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. 

"Go on."

"It's Kat, she hasn't come in this morning, didn't call in to say she was going to be late or nothing."

"Did you call her? See if she's okay?"

"I did and someone answered...it kind of sounded like some chick from Brooklyn. She said Kat was busy for a while but would get in touch soon."

This was not what she needed at this moment. Should she set Fin on a wild goose chase? Her mind flipped through the rogue's gallery that Jim had shown her the night before everything went insane, if she remembered correctly, one of those villains had been originally from Brooklyn. _Kat, please don't do anything stupid_ , she thought desperately. 

"Okay, keep holding down the fort, call me if she calls in. I have a feeling she slipped off to Gotham."

"We need to put a bell on her," Fin said with only slightly disapproval. 

Someone knocked on the door, after peering through the peephole she saw that it was Jim Gordan. She opened the door. "You're telling me...:"

Someone on Jim's face wasn't right.

"Fin? I'll call you back."

She hung up before she could get an answer. Fin was used to that. 

"What's wrong?" she asked immediately. Jim's face looked ten years older than it had the day before; than it had even when he received the list of names of the dead at St. Lawrence. 

"It's the Joker, he's escaped."

Olivia's eyes widened. "Excuse me?"

"He got out, we found a dead guard and an empty cell, there's more, Captain."

"Please, at this point just call me Olivia."

Jim nodded. "Alright, well...Detective Rollins was the last person seen interviewing the Joker, and now she's missing."

Inwardly, Olivia groaned. Hadn't it been years since Amanda had done something this stupid? She had always been a little weak when it came to certain types of suspects, but this was on a whole new level. 

"We think she might have helped him."

"What makes you say that?"

Jim sighed. "This isn't the first woman that the Joker manipulated into helping him escape. Harley Quinn was the first."

Olivia remembered Harley Quinn, the colorful-haired clown woman who had once been a psychiatric intern before the Joker got to her. _Wasn't she from Brooklyn? Did she have Kat?_

There was a lot for Olivia to process. 

"I don't think she would let him escape, Amanda's not like that. Is it possible that he took her hostage?"

Jim nodded, but seem unconvinced. "There were no signs of a struggle. It was like someone opened the door and let him walk out. The head of our Major Crimes Unit, Robert Goren, says it was likely that she escaped with him, due to what they had been talking about at the last interview."

"Goren? I know him, he used to work for us in New York...very smart, very..."

"Eccentric?" Jim raised an eyebrow. "It's pretty much what we do here." 

"Right. Well. Let's head down to the station. What were they talking about?" Olivia grabbed her coat. 

"The Lazarus Pit." There was gravity in Jim's voice. 

"The what?"

"I'll explain on the way."

*

The burn unit of Gotham Hospital was quiet, given the fact that most people were in a medically induced coma while their burns healed. Sonny, however, was still wide awake. His burns, it turned out, were bad, but not as bad as they could have been. High on morphine, he watched the dust as it played through the sunlight streaming in through his window. Given Gotham, he was very surprised that the sun even found its way there. It was beautiful though, Sonny decided. Probably the best thing he had ever watched. It drifted in and out of focus, the strangeness of his back did too. The ruined skin no longer felt like a part of him. Instead, it felt like some sort of thick layer of pain spread across his back. The swelling made it feel gigantic to him. 

In this hazy light-soaked reverie, he saw a flash of gold ignite before his eyes. Before he realized it fully, he saw Amanda crouching before him. Her eyes were swimming, a film of unshed tears glazing them over. She smoothed back a lock of hair on his face in a tender motion that she had never shown him before. 

"I'm dreaming," he croaked. Amanda's face was a mask of pain, there was someone beside her, all he could see was coal dark hair and a surgical mask. The person jittered on the balls of their feet. 

"Hurry up!" the voice said. It sounded familiar. Bad familiar. 

"You're not dreaming, Dominick," Amanda whispered. "We're gonna get you out of here, can you move?"

Sonny's eyes drifted to the wheelchair nearby. He thought of sitting in it. He thought of anything pressed against his back and groaned. Amanda smiled. 

"You got this," she said. "Trust me."

"Oh hell," her companion mumbled. "Allow me."

The ghost of pain moaned louder as the stranger moved to the side of the bed and began to pick Sonny up. 

"Be careful!" Amanda hissed. For the first time, Sonny could hear something like panic in her voice. Was it over him? Something hard pressed against his stomach. Sonny knew it was a gun. 

"I'm _being careful_ ," the Joker replied. "The gun isn't on you anymore, is it?"

Amanda said nothing. Sonny blacked out. 

*

Rafael poured himself more coffee in the breakroom of the Gotham police station, chewing over the new information he had been given. How had he been so blind to Gotham when he was there years before, that there were weird hot tubs that healed you in the basements of rich people? He shook off the thought because it wasn't constructive, downed the burning hot coffee, and poured himself another. 

So the Joker was missing. So was Amanda. Amanda probably helped the Joker since she was still alive. How bad were things right now? Terrible. Luckily, he at least had a lead. 

"Liv," he said as Olivia walked in. Her face looked bleak, and he didn't blame her. 

"This is...this is a mess,' Olivia said with a slight laugh. "I came here for a routine questioning and now my entire team has gone insane."

"Carisi's still in the hospital."

Olivia's phone beeped. She looked down at it. Her laugh turned into a bitter sob. 

"Is he?" 

_Things are moving far faster than anticipated_ , Rafael thought. 

"If they got Carisi, it's only a matter of time before..."

"He gets to the Lazarus Pit, I know. We can head them off there."

It took a minute for it to sink in that they _both_ knew about the Lazarus Pit. Olivia narrowed her eyes. 

"Rafa?"

"Turns out I have an old flame around here who knows about Gotham better than I ever did," Rafael explained. "She told me about this only a few hours ago."

"So you know-"

"Yes." Rafael kept his face carefully trained so that his emotions wouldn't show. "I know what will happen."

"Jim, I mean Commissioner Gordon says we can't send a whole squad to the location, wherever it is, because of some sort of secret or something." Olivia was frustrated, but Rafael was a man of his word. 

"I could see that, but then again, he didn't ban us from going to the location."

"You know where it is?"

Rafael smiled the smile that a warrior shows before the battle. 

"Of course I do," Rafael said. "I have connections."

*

Harley slumped in the chair of the interrogation room. She wasn't under arrest, but this was still a pain in the ass. Poison Ivy sat by the window, trying to soak in as much sun as possible while she could. Knockout had disappeared once Robert insisted on going down to the station to discuss everything, and he didn't mind. The woman probably did not want to run into any coworkers that might be lurking around. 

"I was serious, Bobby, I don't know about no tar pits."

"Lazarus Pit," Robert replied. "It's called a Lazarus Pit."

Harley crossed her arms. "Well, I know nothin'."

Poison Ivy watched Harley pout and primo over this, she had known Harley better than pretty much any human by this point and therefore knew she was lying. It was odd, given how much Harley loved Lucy, and how she had sacrificed for her, that she wouldn't do anything to help her...

"Tell him, Harley," Poison Ivy said. Robert glanced over at the green woman. Usually, he discounted her as some sort of eco-terrorist, but there was a softness to her voice that made her almost seem human. Harley glared. 

"There's nothing to tell."

"Who are you protecting?" Robert had picked up on Poison Ivy's line of thinking. "If it isn't your daughter?"

She crossed one leg over the other. "Someone who would make sure I never saw Lucy again if I said a thing."

*

Sonny was still unconscious as the Joker casually hijacked a car, kept a gun trained on Amanda, and drove them across the bridge to Wayne Manor on the mainland. This had gone completely wrong. She had not agreed to help him escape, not for anything, if a daughter that the Joker sired didn't know about him that seemed like a good idea. Sonny would heal in time, she would figure out another way to repay him. Unfortunately, as soon as she told the Joker everything, he had decided to help. That meant making her call the guard so he could kill her. That meant taking the gun from her in the first place. That meant he was going to help her no matter what, because it would mean that she would be honor-bound to help him. 

It was a twisted sense of justice, but Amanda could kind of understand it. 

She didn't exactly understand the meaning of all this, especially when the Joker broke a window, climbed inside, and unlocked the front door. 

"Isn't someone here?" she asked him as the Joker helped Sonny inside. The Joker (his hair still black thanks to some shoe polish) indicated a corner with his head. Crumpled there was an old man, taken by surprise. Amanda ran to him, leaving Sonny in the Joker's embrace. The Joker kept moving, but Amanda knelt by the older man's side and took his pulse. Still there. She breathed a sigh of relief. 

"Come come!" the joker cried, leading her into the depths of the house. "I've done worse to Alfred in the past! He'll get over it!" 

Beneath Wayne Manor, Amanda had been expecting something, maybe a wine cellar, a game room. Hell, maybe even one of those home theaters. Instead, there was a vast cavern filled like some sort of museum. A large dime hung from the ceiling, a million trinkets were encased in glass. She wanted to stop and look at it all, but time was definitely of the essence. 

"So Bruce Wayne is-"

"Shut up!" the Joker snapped. "Not another word!" 

_Okay..._

Blood had begun to seep from Sonny's back as the Joker's less than stellar handling of him started to take its toll. His face was chalk white, sweat had broken out on his forehead, and Amanda didn't need to have medical training. to know that something was seriously wrong.

"Wait a minute," she said and pressed two fingers against an unburnt part of Sonny's neck. She couldn't find anything. She pressed somewhere else. Nothing. The bleeding on his back stopped. 

"Dominick," she whispered. " _Dominick_. Stay with me, okay? Stay here. Stay...with me."

The Joker seemed bored with this mini-drama and kept dragging Sonny's now cooling body towards a strange bath-tub looking thing in the corner. Water swirled. 

"I think he's dying!" Amanda said. The tears came unbidden. "We shouldn't have moved him!"

"Oh please, what's a little death? He's been dead what, one minute? Two? He was alive in the foyer. Once we get him into the pit it won't matter."

Unceremoniously, the Joker dropped Sonny into the waters of the Lazarus Pit. 

Amanda couldn't bear to bring herself to watch. Sonny was dead, she had felt it. He probably had gone into shock after they moved him. She knew this was a terrible idea. Why had she said anything to the Joker, to begin with? She thought she could have a bargaining chip, instead, she had lead to his death. 

Completely submerged, if this thing wouldn't heal him, he probably would drown. The Joker grabbed onto Amanda's shoulders and held her tightly, forcing her to stand there, by the side of the pit, while it did whatever it was supposed to be doing. 

It felt like an eternity but probably wasn't very long at all, before the pit stopped bubbling. All was still. Sonny was dead. Amanda was lost. 

She was, at least, until Sonny sat up.

He was alive, more than alive, he was _well_. Smooth skin replaced the angry burns on his back. He looked...good. Really good. The Joker released her and she took a step forward, reaching for him.

Then he opened his eyes. Amanda took a step back.

"Oh Amanda," Sonny said. "What did you do!?" 


	12. I'm a Big Fan

Amanda could not read Sonny's eyes. 

The ghostly pall that she had seen overtake him upon his death was gone from his face. In fact, he glowed with health. The blood that would have otherwise been matted to his back was washed away, revealing new, smooth skin. He didn't look younger exactly, but he looked like a person at the absolute best time of their life. He looked as though he had been taken from whatever mildly-good health he was in at the time of his death and brought instead to the absolute peak of himself. He was still Sonny. He was still human. But it felt like...more. 

His eyes, though. They were vibrating pools of madness. 

"Dominick?" She took a step towards him, and for the first time actually felt true fear over getting closer to him. His eyes, that aggravating dark blue that grew darker in the storm of his disappointed but confused look, they darted over her face like she was a book too hard to read. 

"Did you just bring me back to _life_ , Amanda?" He sounded incredulous. 

"Um. No. You were just injured and..." Her voice trailed, and he followed it, before deciding to pick it up for himself. 

"...But you wanted to save me. No, you _had_ to save me," he finished. She felt her head nod before she had even made the decision on whether to agree. 

Behind her, the Joker snickered.

"What?" Amanda whispered to him fiercely. 

"I forgot to tell you something," the Joker admitted. 

"What?!"

The Joker looked at Sonny in the wet tatters of his hospital dress. He strode over to two large doors set in the wall of the vast cave and rummaged through it. He withdrew a suit. 

"You're a little skinnier and taller than him," the Joker remarked as he walked over to Sonny. "But I think it'll do in a pinch." 

As though this was the most normal thing in the world, he accepted the suit with the nod someone gives a cashier after buying a pack of gum. Carefully, and with deliberate cautiousness, he began to dress. Amanda stood in the same spot, desperately wishing she could read the room. It _was_ Sonny, she could tell that much, she could feel it in the good part of her gut. She knew it was him, but also it was not him. Yes, he was nourished, but it was at the expense of something else. 

The suit was too wide for him, but the heights were fine. He contemplated how to tie a tie. 

Amanda stood there. 

"Sonny, are you-"

"Okay?" Sonny looked up at her as he let his hands remember the way. "Yeah. I'm okay. But you wouldn't say it."

"What?"

Tie properly tied, he pointed at her. "You wouldn't say it, you couldn't just tell me you had to save me."

"Sonny, I don't understand."

He burst out laughing. It wasn't Sonny's laugh. It was high pitched and nervous, it didn't enjoy itself. The Joker crossed his arms as though he were admiring a painting. 

"Do you know what you do to me, Amanda?" 

The words flared in her _not this again_ , but she quieted them down. 

"Do you know that every time you hand me one-a your daughters. Every time I'm invited over to cook for you. Every time I'm there when Jesse wants a story, or when Billie cries. I'm walking into the life I want but don't have. Now, in the span of a few hours, I've visited a couple of plains of existence that I didn't even really think about before this, but maybe every time I do that, every time I say yes to you, I'm letting myself jump into a plane of existence where you finally tell me what I mean to you."

Amanda was, quite frankly, speechless.

Sonny took a step closer. 

Amanda did not step back.

"Because every time I think 'hey, maybe this is what she wants but is scared of' because I would be scared. There's a lot on the line, but you won't let me stay one way or the other, and I don't want to make a fool out of myself by making the first move again."

Sonny took a step closer. 

Amanda did not step back. He was close to her now. She had seen the tension in him before when he would yell at the crowds around crime scenes, condemning them for inaction. With Sonny's sweetness, it was easy to forget that rage. He reached up to touch her cheek, and she felt tears falling down her face. His eyes were red with his own. They were back in that motel in West Virginia. They were standing in the doorway and he was leaning in, loose, a little drunk. He hovered on the line and Amanda had to make a choice. Now, she might be able to make the right one. Her eyes half-closed, she tilted her head slightly, more towards him. He leaned in, they were so close, all she had to do a little bit more. She still had to make the choice. 

But something was wrong. 

"Alright, this has gone on long enough, I believe." The Joker grabbed Sonny by the collar and ripped him roughly backward, away from Amanda. He stumbled, but didn't fall, and immediately began to shake. He ran his hands through his hair over and over. 

"I don't understand what's happening to me," Sonny said calmly. He was rocking back and forth. "I don't understand why my thoughts keep happening."

Amanda was dizzy with disappointment and confusion as she ran to the Joker's side, fully prepared to smack him one. 

"I don't know where my thoughts go," Sonny whispered. "Where do they go? When I am not thinking them? Where do they go until I remember them back?"

"What's wrong with him?" Amanda snarled. "You tell me what's wrong with him!" 

The Joker put on the best innocent face he had. "Didn't I tell you? There are side effects." 

"I didn't even want to do this! You made me! You made him!" 

"Well I could hardly just put him back, especially after the move killed him."

"Killed him? Kill who?" Sonny asked, frightened. 

"Nothing Carisi, it's okay." Calling him "Carisi" was the better bet for this moment. 

"You!" The Joker said back to him. Sonny's confusion deepened. 

"Stop it!" Amanda punched the Joker in the arm. He then reminded her that he had a gun. Only showed it to her though, no need to get testy yet. 

"The Lazarus Pit can cure death, within reason of course, but it also has a tiny side effect of making one lose their minds."

This seemed to hit Carisi a little. "Minds? Mine? No."

"You didn't tell me that!" 

The Joker shrugged. 

"You didn't ask."

"But all that stuff he said! That stuff about-"

"Spare me," the Joker cut her off. "Please. It'll sound just as crazy coming from you, I bet. Now let's go."

Gun trained on her, he bade her to walk.

"What? We can't take him with us."

"We're not going to, now come on. I did your thing, it's time for mine."

Sonny had crumpled to the ground, his head in his hands. The Joker waggled his gun. 

'If you don't move right now, I'll shoot "Sonny" in the kneecap and then I will shoot you in the head and you both can just rot here in the Batcave, but if you cooperate with me right now neither of you will be injured and I can _finally_ do my thing." 

"One second."

Amanda knelt in front of Sonny and took his head in her hands. 

"Go upstairs, it's through that bookcase. Take my phone." She handed him his phone, she clutched it. "And try to remember or forget this, whatever will make you happier." 

She leaned in and kissed him then. It wasn't the kiss either of them had imagined, for both were different types of romantics. It was the kind of kiss you give someone because you aren't sure you're going to see them again, and you've come to the realization that you may regret not giving that kiss one day. It was like putting a bookmark in him and setting him down, promising to read him later if she wasn't shot in the head by a murder clown before the end of the day. The Joker gave a theatrical sigh.

"And people call me dramatic." 

Amanda glared as she followed him, and she didn't turn back to look at Sonny as she left. She couldn't bear to.

*

Sonny was alone, the ghost of Amanda's kiss still on his lips. His mind did not feel correct. It felt slippery, hard to grasp. Sometimes he felt as though everything in the world made sense, and then all of a sudden he would feel as though he did not know anything at all. He felt like some person in myth who is stricken with madness. What a generic thing to say, what were the diagnostics in that? Simple "madness". But now, trapped in his brain prison, he could kind of begin to understand. Or not understand. He was mad, after all. 

He wanted to find the upstairs, but he jammed Amanda's phone in his pocket and began to wander. There was so much to look at, from a giant dime to a scratched quarter. Weapons and wands and all sorts of vehicles and costumes. This guy did more than just dress up like a bat and fight crimes, he was also an incredible curator of this type of vigilante history. Exquisite. 

Sonny did not hear the gentle padding of feet behind him, nor would he have noticed it if someone had stomped up to him in tap shoes. He was heavily engrossed in a book of riddles at the time. The intruder crept up behind Sonny, gently tapping him on the shoulder. Sonny whipped around, grabbing the stranger by his shoulder and twisting his arm behind him. The stranger squealed. 

"Tell me who you are and why you are trying to kill me!" Sonny yelled. 

"I'm Edward Nygma," the stranger whimpered, trying not to get his arm broken. "I'm not trying to kill you, I just...kind of live here." 

Sonny quickly let Edward go. 

"Oh shit," Sonny breathed. "Are you the Riddler?"

"Yes," the Riddler said. 

"Awesome," Sonny replied. "I'm a big fan." 


	13. It's a Riddle, Huh?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter today, but I didn't want anyone to think that this story was stalled! I appreciate everyone reading this so far!

When Jim Gordon and Olivia Benson finally got to the Batcave, it was empty. Olivia drifted through the museum-like setting, trying to figure out how Bruce Wayne had managed to build something so intense with no one figuring out his secret. 

"Does everyone just assume that Bruce Wayne is Batman but they don't tell him?" Olivia asked, staring at the giant T-Rex frozen in mid-roar. Jim shook his head. 

"It's a real, honest-to-god secret," he replied. "Too much happens around here for anyone to put the pieces together. This way." 

He led her down towards where the Lazarus Pit stood, and Olivia felt tension building in her core. She was approaching the land of the insane, about to face down something that she never would have imagined before. Would the Lazarus Pit be able to help Mike Dodds, back when he was been so terribly injured? Was it a good thing that Sonny was apparently being subjected to it, knowing that his burns might not be the end of his career? 

Would Sonny even want that? 

"Bruce doesn't want to be healed by the pit, why is that? Seems like a very easy thing to do," Olivia observed. Jim shook his head. 

"Healing in the pit brings on insanity," Jim replied. "Bruce likes to be in control."

"Are you saying that Carisi will be healed, but insane? That really doesn't sound like a good trade."

"It's temporary, for the most part. Bruce is just afraid of what he'll do while in the grips of it."

That didn't sound as terrible as before, and Olivia allowed herself a little hope. If Amanda had in fact been taken against her will instead of willingly working with the Joker, at least Sonny would be there to help her out. Maybe they could even overpower the Joker and were already heading back to the station...

"And you haven't tried to heal him anyway?" Olivia asked. Jim looked thoughtful for a moment. 

"You know, it hadn't occurred to me," he said. "Bruce didn't want it, I didn't think about what would happen if I did it anyway. It sounds like something Catwoman would do though..."

Olivia had heard the name "Catwoman" before, but everything was getting a little too much for her, so she decided not to continue down this line of thinking. She was really only concerned about her own people at this point. 

Jim froze in his tracks. 

"Oh hell," he mumbled. 

The Lazarus Pit was still there, technically, but it had been filled with various objects snatched from around the cave. The waters were now stagnant, and whatever electronics had been dumped inside were now pretty much useless. Olivia stared down at the pit, unbelieving. 

"They destroyed it," Jim said. "The last one."

"Why would the Joker do that? Why would Amanda let him?"

"Maybe she didn't have a choice," Jim said. "Either way, they're gone, and so is your guy."

Olivia closed her eyes. This was getting more complicated by the minute.

*

"Did you really have to destroy the pit?" the Riddler asked as he rolled up the window of the car they had stolen. Sonny kept sticking his head out to feel the wind like he was a dog or something. It was driving him nuts. 

"I had to get rid of that because it had too many secrets," Sonny explained in a decent approximation of a rational voice. "Those secrets are dangerous, I don't even want to know them."

"Right." The Riddler thought he spoke in riddles, but then again, he had never met someone freshly resurrected from a Lazarus Pit. 

Edward Nygma couldn't even explain to himself why he had decided to take Sonny along with him. Maybe it was because he seemed so vulnerable. Maybe Edward was actually a nice guy.

...Nah.

"Great!' the Riddler said. "Now I'm going to stop at this bank, and you do what we rehearsed, right?" 

Sonny nodded, distracted. "Where's Amanda?"

"Who?"

"Amanda. She saved me, I think."

The Riddler shrugged and turned his eyes back to the road. "She might just be in your head there, buddy." 

Sonny gently thumped his head against the closed window a few times. "I want the air back."

"There's air in the car, see?" Edward reached over and turned up the air conditioning. Sonny scowled. 

"Fake air."

"You can breathe it, right?"

Sonny didn't say anything. The Riddler was beginning to regret dressing the man up in one of his very own, amazing green question-mark suits. At first he thought that it would be a better idea than wandering around in an outfit too large for him, especially since Sonny actually fit in his clothes, but it was all wrong. He wouldn't even keep his mask on. What's the point of having a henchman if he refused to wear a mask? Maybe he should trade this guy to the Mad Hatter. Jervis would at least know how to control the guy, right?

Edward turned on the radio. 

" _A tragic update to the St. Lawrence Cathedral tragedy...one of the survivors, Detective Dominick Carisi Jr., has gone missing from Gotham Hospital. Surveillance tapes from the hospital have confirmed that the Joker, along with a member of the NYPD, were responsible for this heinous kidnapping. Detective Carisi was one of the few survivors of the explosion of the cathedral that left 11 dead, including the infamous Mad Hatter, Jervis Tetch."_

Sonny started to laugh. "He's the saint of comedians, did you know that?"

Edward stared at Sonny in horror. "Jervis died?"

"What kind of a name is Jervis?"

Edward didn't know. It was a riddle indeed. Not a very good one, though. 

"This might be worse news than originally thought," Edward said thoughtfully. "And to think, I thought this was just going to be one of those lively jaunts we foes like to go on...but with Batman gone...hmm..."

Sonny's eyes were bright in the dim light. "It's a riddle, huh?" He twisted around to count the question marks on his new suit jacket. 

"No, not particularly." He did have to give him credit for trying to tie things into the theme. 

The large, austere building of the Gotham Bank loomed large in the distance. It was night time, so the bank was closed, but that just meant that there were more night guards than civilians. Not a bad plan...even if it lacked something. 

Edward pulled down a side street and parked. "This is a little guache for my tastes, but I think that desperate times call for desperate measures."

"Are times really that desperate?" Sonny asked. Edward shoved a gun into the detective's hands.

"Yeah, pretty desperate. I can't even think of a good riddle for this one."

"When is a detective not a detective?" Sonny asked him, his face deadly serious. Edward stared at him. Sonny reached over and took the bowler hat off of Edward's head, placing it on his own. The question mark wasn't centered. 

"Um, when?"

"When he's robbing a bank!" Sonny burst out laughing. Edward sighed. 

"Yup, that's a good one. Good riddle there. Do you see the bank?"

Sonny pointed in the direction of the bank. That was good enough for Edward. 

"Great. Now out you go."

Sonny exited the vehicle as though he were in a dream. None of this was actually happening, he informed himself. He was already dead. This was a dead dream. He could do whatever he liked. 

"I shouldn't hurt anyone, right?" he asked Edward through the window. 

Edward shrugged. 

"Just no dye packs, okay?"

Sonny laughed. 

"I'm a cop," he said in seriousness. "I know how to rob a bank."

With that, he marched on with wobbly, new legs. Edward leaned on the steering wheel and placed his chin in his hands. 

"Do me proud, Riddler Jr.," he said quietly. 

And if he didn't...who cared? 


End file.
